What's good, George Bo Ross back again with another video. So I'm going to check out 10 WWE returns that were genuine surprises. This year has been a very interesting year for just WWE returns in general. Obviously, the biggest one that a lot of people are going to be talking about for a while is CM Punk returning back to WWE. Many people did not think it was going to happen. Some people speculated, but people didn't really think that was a possibility and it actually happened. So it's just one of those types of things where a good return can sometimes reset like the whole landscape for WWE or AEW or just wrestling in general. It's like a hard reset. Like when Bray Wyatt returned at Extreme Rules, rest in peace, Bray, that was such an adult moment. Yes, you know, a lot of fans, you know, felt some type of way with the way he got released from WWE and then for him to come back the way he did and the excitement it brought was just great. It's like a hard reset depending on the star or wrestler that does return. It brings that more that extra excitement to potential feuds and story lines. So we're going to check out some of the best genuine surprises that people didn't really know or weren't too sure about. Appreciate all of the support you guys have shown on the channel. Let's get right into this. Due to the rise in social media and digital news, it's hard to keep a return in pro wrestling a top secret. Several returns over the past decade or so have been leaked online and this has ultimately ruined the complete surprise that WWE had in store for fans. Due to this, WWE must now take special measures in order to keep returns top secret. Yeah, it's difficult for them to succeed at this. It says there are molds just about everywhere. However, WWE have managed to bring numerous wrestlers back without a single report of the planned return leaking online. Yeah. And this intent has made the return memorable for all the right reasons. Join us now as WrestleMania looks at 10 WWE returns that were genuine surprises. Subscribe to WrestleMania if you haven't already. Be sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell for daily wrestling videos and follow us on Facebook for exclusive lists. Number 10, Christian Royal Rumble 2021. Due to the 2021 Royal Rumble taking place in the Thunderdome, fans expected there to be a lack of surprise returns in the matchup. Due to there being no physical fans in attendance, the match and any planned returns were going to be difficult to execute correctly. But to WWE's credit, they did a fantastic job under difficult circumstances. One of the surprise returns on the show that nobody saw coming was the return of Christian Christian and seemingly retired from pro wrestling. And it was reported that he would never wrestle again. Therefore, when the former world champion into the Rumble match, fans were utterly speechless. Now, that was a good return that he still had it and even had a memorable interaction with his best friend Edge. I just wish there was a crowd there for that. Oh, that wish it was a crowd there for that. It would have been a cool moment. Appearing on the bump, Christian revealed that he only found out about the return a few days before the event. I found out about the return at 7 30 on Friday night, and it was a well-win from there. In hindsight, I would have liked a little more time being able to get in the ring and things like that. But it also gave me, I was nervous when I got the call. Where's my gear? These are the things I have to find. He didn't even know there was no time to think. I had so much to do to prepare on Saturday. Then we all went in the arena on Sunday, and I was surprisingly calm. But I having stepped foot in the ring for seven years, there were no nerves. This is what I was born to do. Number nine, Carlito backlash 2023. The 2023 back. This was a cool one to reviews from fans. The event took place in Puerto Rico, and the crowd was one of the liveliest, most engaging crowds imaginable. During the acclaimed Bad Bunny vs. English matchup, Carlito made a surprise return and he received the ovation. Yeah, that was so cool. It was completely unexpected, and it literally broke Twitter as fans were in total disbelief that the former U.S. and Intercontinental champion was back in WWE. She was so cool. Overwhelmingly positive response to his return. WWE offered Kali to a full-time return contract, which thankfully he accepted. And it looks like the popular star will be having one more run in WWE before he hangs up his boots for good. Which I'm all for. Number eight, Nia Jax wrote 2023. And WWE managed to keep Nia Jax's return to WWE top secret, which for a return happening, I don't know how many people were actually excited about this. But yes, they did do a good job of keeping this very secret secretive. Not many people knew. Granted, I don't think many people cared, but that's a discussion for another day. On Raw SmackDown, it's very hard to do. Every week before each of WWE's flagship shows, a rundown is released online, and this usually contains any planned returns or cameos. But Jax's return wasn't remotely leaked. She will return during the real replay versus Raquel Rodriguez matchup. And also with some questions surrounding why WWE had decided to bring back the controversial figure, it was certainly appreciated that WWE had managed to keep the return under wraps. Number seven, John Cena Money in the Bank 2021 and 2023. Yeah. John Cena is the undisputed king of surprise returns as he's managed to return time and time again without it being known in advance. Every fan recalls Cena's return in the 2008 Royal Rumble. That was a good one. And even in the age of social media, Cena has been able to make a surprise return without a single person knowing about it. At the 2021 Money in the Bank event, Roman Reigns had just defeated Edge in the main event. And this was when Cena returned to confront the tribal chief. Oh my God, that was so good. Cena arguably received the largest ovation of his entire career, as every single fan in attendance was delighted to see one of the greatest of all time. Fast forward to the 2023 Money in the Bank event. This was a good one, too. Cena did it yet again. During the show, Cena's iconic music will begin to play. It was wonderful to see in the UK fans that Cena know how appreciated he was. And it was truly a moment that the fan base will never ever forget. And it's really good, the fact that they were able to pull those genuine surprises from a very big star like John Cena and no one saw it coming. Kudos. Kudos to WWE on that one, man. Number six, Brock Lesnar's Summer Slam 2021. This is another good one, bro. Now, the 2018 John Cena in the main event of Summer Slam in 2021. Dub didn't like this one as well. The fans were in for a total shock. This is when Brock Lesnar's music hit. There were no reports that Lesnar was returning to WWE. In fact, there were rumors that Lesnar may have been completely done with the company. Lesnar returned as a baby face to confront Reigns and Paul Heyman and it was a magical moment that will plant the seeds for WWE's next top feud. One of the reasons why the surprise return was so well received and so fondly remembered was because Lesnar's subsequent run was arguably one of the finest runs of Lesnar's entire career. I know someone's going to send this to Dub because you guys are messy, but I'm impartial. I'm impartial. I can I can give honest criticism and praise when it's deserved. Not gonna lie to you. His his run when he came back as the baby face without Paul Heyman, it actually worked. The WrestleMania match wasn't as good, but I think that was due to I think Roman had ended up. He was injured so they had to kind of call an audible, but their last man standing match was fantastic at Summer Slam. So I mean, it worked. He actually seemed more. It seemed like he was enjoying himself more out there without Paul Heyman. He has to carry the promos. He has to carry the interviews in the backstage segments. Like, you know, it's not just him destroying people in the ring. He actually actually have some charisma and it actually worked. No dogs are gonna like this, but it worked. It worked. It wasn't boring. It actually worked and we end up getting one of the best last man standing matches of all time. Now then his feud with Cody, even though the matches were good, it didn't make a lick of sense either. But that's neither here nor there. But either way, him coming back to confront Roman actually worked here. Lesnar's work as a baby face was excellent and he managed to show the fans a brand new side of him that had never been seen on WWE TV. Number five, the Rock Roar 2011. WWE announced this was a really good one hosting WrestleMania 27. They were when he returned this year. That was people knew he was in the area, but no one thought he was actually going to be on a show. He was circulating that it was going to be pop megastar Justin Bieber. However, when the guest host was revealed to be the great one himself, the Rock fans were amazed. WWE had managed to keep the Rock's return from leaking online and the reaction from the audience on Roar when he returned was without question one of the largest ovations in WWE history. According to the Rock himself during an interview with Entertainment Weekly, his 2011 Roar return was the greatest moment he had ever experienced on WWE's premiere shows. It's exciting standing backstage and knowing that there's a great anticipation in the air. There are probably 18,000 people hanging on every minute before the big announcement happened. So now the challenge for me is to have fun and electrify and entertain the audience. And he did a 20, 25 minute monologue when my music hit going out. It was incredible. The night was the greatest Roar moment I've ever experienced. And that's saying a lot. I've had the privilege to work with a lot of icons in WWE. The goosebumps never left my body during that monologue. Oh my God. Roman Reigns and SummerSlam 2020. This was good too. The 2020 SummerSlam with the tagline you'll never see it coming. And they were spot on with this. We did. The event featured the surprise return of Roman Reigns. Reigns took a step back from WWE during the pandemic. Oh my God. I just we just didn't know he was going to hold the championship for the next three years. But nevertheless, it was a good moment. And it wasn't remotely hinted or rumored that Reigns would be making his return at the SummerSlam event. Reigns would return following the main event that's hanging the Fiend and Braun Strowman before holding the Universal title high in the air. This return was game changing as Reigns would turn with a completely new character and WWE had finally pulled a trigger on Reigns being a top heel in the company. Number three, the Hardy Boyz WrestleMania 33. Deserves to be there too. The biggest crowd ovations in WrestleMania history. The Hardy Boyz's surprise return at WrestleMania 33 has to be towards the top of the list. The duo returned to be part of a multi-team ladder match and their ovation was truly insane. Fantastic. That the two may potentially be WWE bound. It was never expected that the two would make the return at WrestleMania, especially because Matt and Jeff had wrestled a night prior in an action pack match against the Young Bucks. According to Matt Hardy to prevent the return leaking out, he used social media to his advantage and used an old picture to pretend that the duo were flying home. This managed to fool the majority of fans as they took Hardy's social media post as face value and assumed that he and Jeff wouldn't be part of WrestleMania. Number two, Shane McMahon Raw 2016. This was another great one. I want Steve McMahon being announced as a recipient of the Vincent J. McMahon Legacy of Excellence Award. Before he started taking over the show and then proclaimed himself as the best in the world and inserted himself in the best in the world tournament that before that this Shane when he first came back. Ah, such a cool moment man. Nobody could have ever anticipated this to be the segment in which Shane McMahon would make his dramatic return to WWE programming. There was a state of shock that fell over the fan base as the Raw return wasn't even rumoured. In fact, there was nothing remotely indicating that Shane was on his way back to WWE. This marked his first appearance in almost seven years and the main purpose of his return was to build towards a WrestleMania 32 showdown with the Undertaker. Despite the storyline with Taker being implicated, it's too complicated how Shane's initial return ended up being and WWE deserve a ton of credit for managing to avoid such a significant return from leaking out. And number one, Edge Royal Rumble 2020. One of the favourite Edge had seemingly retired from pre-wrestling in 2011. It was ruled Edge shouldn't even take a bump ever again. Never mind a full blown wrestling match. So good man. With his trademark theme here at 2020's Royal Rumble, the fans lost their mind. Rated our superstar multi-time world champion was back and he wasn't wasting a single second as Edge hit Spears left right and centre. Even though I did hear rumours about this, like people were talking and speculating that Edge was going to be in the Royal Rumble that year. So I think it deserves to be on the list. I don't know if this would be number one because I remember watching videos of people talking about yeah Edge made. There's a good chance Edge will be there or what not. But at the same time I just wasn't 100% sure. I just wasn't sure. But when his music hit it hit me. It hit me. I got goosebumps man. It was a special moment that was hard to watch without being emotional. DJ Edge being one of the biggest names of all time, WWE went to Extreme Lens to prevent his return leaking out. And Edge went into detail in relation to this during an interview with ESPN. I told the Triple H, Paul Lavec and said I can't go to a ring anywhere because people will start seeing me. I can't go to the PC so they sent me a ring. I got away out of space and they set up a ring. Basically had my own personal field of dreams and I just got in there and got to work. Thankfully I married to another Hall of Famer who can pick up and body slam me which you can't save for a lot of wives. They both live in Asheville so they'd come and they'd get in there with me and they'd put me through my paces. But the year of it folks came to the WWE returns that was. But even then, even with all that I do remember the rumors I do it wasn't concrete but there were rumors that Edge was going to return at that royal rumble. So even with him kind of for the most part them keeping it under wraps there were still rumors being tossed around and I remember watching videos about it. I didn't put too much thought into it because I was like if he returns cool if he don't it is what it is but when he did it was such a memorable moment. Comment down below let me know what is a genuine shocking return for you even if it was leaked online. If it was you know you've seen a video or whatever the case may have been someone told you a friend told you it's still genuinely shocked you when that person returned. Even if you did hear about it or if you didn't hear about it. If it wasn't they weren't listed on this video let me know down below because there's been some fantastic returns that people really didn't know and it's it shocked you but I appreciate all of the support you guys shown on channel Road to 150K. I'm still here and speed you to the wrestling champion world. Appreciate you all kicking in with me. See you on the next one. Peace.


Hello everybody. Welcome to the Brooklyn Museum. On behalf of Arnold Lehmann, our director here, and Radhia Harper, our Vice Director for Education and Program Development, we are so, so, so happy to be hosting this talk between Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Wayne, May Wiens, and our curator of contemporary art here, Eugene Sizer. Anybody else who's excited about this? This first solo exhibition is on view here at the Brooklyn Museum. It's called Origin of the Universe. If you haven't seen it yet, I've already made you guys a video about how they use their work to challenge conventional ideas of beauty, race, and gender. Now before I introduce these fabulous artists, I want to point out this little, this camera, do you want to pick this up? So I don't know how familiar you guys are with the programming we've done for Mickalene Thomas, but we've done a lot of things. And we have one last program after this program tonight to really talk about her work and what the next step is. So this is going to be a round table that's entitled The Black Female Body. And we're going to be exploring such questions as how is a black female body being idealized and misread and visual culture? And how might these tendencies affect black women today? And that's going to be moderated by a deviless who's right here in the front row. So please check that out. That's going to be next Saturday, right here in the same space at 2 p.m. So now, Mickalene Thomas. Ms. Mickalene Thomas was born in Camden, New Jersey. She received a BFA in painting from Pratt Institute and her MFA in painting from Yale University, working primarily in painting, collage, and photography. Her work addresses art history, femininity, and notions of beauty, particularly in relation to African American women. Her work has been collected by many major institutions, including the MoMA, the National Portrait Gallery, right here at the Brooklyn Museum, and many others. And she has been exhibited extensively in both solo and group exhibitions. Her first solo museum exhibition, Origin of the Universe, was organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and has been greatly expanded for its presentation here at the Brooklyn Museum. And this is only going to be on view until January the 20th. So come back and see it, because you don't have much longer. Okay, that's it. A fully illustrated catalog, the first monograph on Ms. Mickalene Thomas, is available downstairs at the shop. Currently, in addition to the show we have here, her work can also be seen in a solo exhibition at the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Art, in Boston. And that's on view until April 7th. Okay, I know the introduction is a little long, but we want to make sure to give people their due credit and everything like that, right? Now to Ms. Carrie May Wings. Carrie May Wings, Carrie May Wings invited, and MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and continue to her studies in a graduate program in folklore at the University of California Berkeley. Working across a variety of media, primarily photography and video, her work is invested in storytelling, and the ways in which history, art history, community, and identity impact our lived experiences and the stories we tell. Her work is represented in the collections of many major institutions, including the MoMA, the MET, the Whitney, and right here at the Brooklyn Museum, and that's just to name a few locally. And she's been included in more than 150 solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Most recently, she has been the subject of a major career retrospective, Carrie May Wings, three decades of photography and video, and that was organized by the First Center for the Visual Arts in National Tennessee, and it's on view until January 13th of this year. This year and next, exhibition will travel to Portland, to the Portland Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Canter Center for Visual Arts at Stanford, and will be on view at the Guggenheim from January 24th through April 23rd. So that's not too far away, go check that out. It will be accompanied by a full color illustrated catalog published by the Yale University Press with essays by leading and emerging scholars. Ms. Carrie May Wings has been the recipient of numerous awards and many prizes. Most recently, in November of 2012, she was among five American artists awarded the Medal of Arts by the United States State Department for her contributions to the advancement of art and diplomacy. Can we give her a round of applause for this Dean Curator up ahead of her exhibition which showcases the work under the radar of the artist. Here they are, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie May Wings, Carrie May Wings. I wanted to tell you how this conversation came about, and the idea came from remarks made by Mickalene in a 2011 interview in Bomb Magazine. She, you, had just moved to Portland, Oregon in the early 90s, where you were going to school studying free law and theater, and you're hanging out with musicians and artists, and you had just started to make art yourself. And then you said, and then I went to see the show of Carrie May Wings' photography at the Portland Art Museum, and that was just an incredibly important experience for me in getting started as an artist. So could you tell us a little bit about seeing the show, that experience, and what it meant to you? Well, yeah, it was I believe 1994. I went to the show because actually a friend of mine at that time was, he's a photographer who's taken a photo class and said, you have to see this work. It's amazing. And so I went with him to the exhibition and was just inspired and sort of overwhelmed with familiarity of myself. It was the first time seeing images that called home. I was living in Portland for a number of years, or away from my family, and these images were so poignant and direct, and they felt like they were telling my story. Do you want me to show some images? Yeah, sure. And I think I saw the show probably like five or six times. I kept going back to the show and immediately learned as much as I could about Carrie May Wings, you know, she went to school in California and just read some books about who she was, and decided that at that time that I was going to make my own art, and went to the art store and got some really cheesy pastels, and actually... So these are mostly from Aimee Jocan and The Kitchen Table series. Yeah, these are all the ones that I saw that sort of really... One thing that I really responded to was the texts with these photographs, because they led to a sort of narrative and story, and they were signifiers to tell you the view of what was happening in the image, and I'm related to that. And the one that really struck me was the next one, I think, that's here. And so what I did, you can see here, here, I think that you're seeing this for the first time. That's actually an oil pastel that I did after seeing Carrie May Wings show. And I did these series of works on paper, all based from Carrie's work. And applied to Pratt Institute with them. You did? So how many... I did talk about 10 of them, and this is one of the slides that I could find, and remembered seeing this photograph and thinking, I'm going to try to interpret that as I saw it and would admit. And how I was feeling at that time living in Portland, sort of strange for my family. There was a lot going on between my relationship with my mother at the time, and just coming to terms with my own sexuality, my identity, and living in a predominantly white community, and dealing with my issues of beauty, and relating to that. And so this really spoke to me, and so I wanted to make an image of it. Friend, family friend, and mentor took me to your opening, Rahima Latif. And she introduced me to you at that opening, and I think she exchanged a conversation about how I saw your show, and how it, for me, changed my life. And I was thinking about, with that, would work, the power of work, how work can sort of, as an artist, why we make art, and how once you have these ideas and notions, and you're a creator in one space as your studio, but then you release it out into the world, and how it can really transform someone.   So, for me, it was that poignant and transformative of sort of me deciding to change my career, and not pursuing law, and becoming an artist. That's amazing. Yeah, so, and here I am today, sitting and talking about my first drawings, and it's basically a photograph. You know, I have to say that if it's possible, if it's possible, it's true that it's possible to have a certain kind of influence on someone like you, who is so absolutely extraordinary. Not yet then. I am. Completely. It's beyond flattery. It actually has very little to do with flattery. I think I'm humbled by it. And when I walked into your exhibition this evening, I was humbled by it. I was humbled by the power of the work, by the boldness of the work, by your ability to take this sort of sense of history painting, and these ideas about constructing images and bending it away, where you're completely playing the essence of yourself, and the magic of yourself, and the beauty of yourself, and the way that it spills over. I mean, the room was, oh, it's a character model. And so many guys, the power to make things happen, that you should say, ashe. Ashe.  I'm basking in love. Yeah. And it's, you know, some of my mother's friends here who know the story. There's, you know, one of the things that I find so amazing about the work, and I'm really thrilled to be here because I think that we have a ton of friends in the audience, people that we've known for years, supporters, friends, fellow artists, people who are making extraordinary things happen, making extraordinary work, who help us with our work, who make what we think possible of Eugene, who I've worked with for years, who have known for years, you have also known for years. So it's really a pleasure to be here. And I do really take this very humbly, because I think they're really a role, that our role in ways to, is to widen the path, is to make a way for those that are coming behind us. And in part, you know, one of the things that I really love about seeing the show is the role of Yamaha in the room. And the way in which she takes on a very particular space in the work. And I was hoping that actually you might talk a little bit about all of your mother in widening this path for you in making this particular kind of work possible. Yeah, that was a challenge, because that sort of space to navigate within that space is very personal. And it's personal, and it's very much a slippery slope, because you will uncover things about a person that you never knew, and that you learned, and you wish you didn't know. So you open this Pandora box, and you can't close it. And so you have to allow it to take its own course. And I think this film was, I don't like to consider it a homage to my mother, I think it's a celebration. It's a celebration of her own trajectory. From my viewpoint, my perception as not only a daughter, but a person looking at her life, and trying to comprehend who she is as a mother, a black woman, a lover, a divorcee, an abused woman, a drug addict, and looking at her and wanting to know who she is as a human being. Are you the only child? No, I'm black like one, but I do have one. I'd actually like to turn the conversation to you a bit, Kerry. We spoke a couple of weeks ago, and I, on the phone, I called Kerry and just wanted to chat a bit about this evening, and I said, mistakenly, in my evening, Mickalene Thomas, regard to as a role model. But I didn't say that. This was me speaking. And Kerry responded very strongly to the word role model, and I realized now that I will reframe my question. I was hoping that you would speak about your role models, how you got started. But now I was asking if perhaps you would tell us a little bit about influences. The road through the art world is not an easy one, and it necessitates talent and intelligence, which you obviously have, but also sometimes the help of other people and things and events. And I'm just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. I have some images also I could show. I don't know if they relate to inspirations, but there is a, you know, whether it's, you know, whether it's a sound detection or music, or you know, the last two weeks I've been completely absorbed by Rodriguez. I cannot get some music out of my head. But there is, you know, yes, there have been many influences.  I'm sure no question it was a great influence. I mean, you know, I've just come from many, many different places. In terms of, you know, other artists that I've been really close with, you know, it's- Who was your Carrie Mae Wings? Who was your Carrie Mae Wings? I mean, I think that probably I didn't really have one in that way. But there was, I think, I think that Zoran and Hurston was very important for me as a young artist who gave me a sort of sense of possibility, a sense of scope and range. And it was probably in some kind of way really through my encounter with Zora and Zora's work that really helped me sort of tease out something that would become important in terms of the way I would work and think about work and think about artists in Red Forb or other states of being, right?  So Zora was very important to me, though, of an artist, of an artist that, you know, lingered with me and different ones do it at different times for other reasons. So, you know, I was looking at Gary Simmons' work this afternoon, really beautiful, those eraser paintings are just fabulous, you know. So there are many people that are on my radar. But I am interested in, you know, this idea of how one refers to the historical, refers to those who have come before, and these ideas about using kind of historical narrative, historical drama, historical painting to make, to make history photographs or history paintings. I think that was actually part of it was given to me by Denise Merrill. I think we have three of your images here. And this is, that's the series of not, you know, it's like not Monet's type. It's not Monet's type. It's not Monet's type. Right. There is, it's a series of five, actually. And of course, let's look at the, do you read it for us? It's standing on shaky ground. I pull this myself. Our critical study was no longer certain of the questions to be asked. It was clear that I was not Monet's type. And Picasso, who had a way with women, only used me after Jean never even considered me. But it could have been worse, I imagine, I think, at Pooning time. But I think, you know, the thing, I love that, you know, this, this, this. So how do you think about using Monet and your, I mean, I have a similar space, in a similar space, that, you know, these women aren't Monet's type, are Monet's type, are Corbett's type. Any of the men that I sort of pull from to reclaim a space. So for me, I'm interested in reclaiming that space and transforming it, as far as the image of how we see beauty. So are you, is this in any way an homage to? No, I don't think it's a, I think, I think it's, it's a discourse, it's a conversation. For me, it's a conversation to, to have people to create a dialogue with. And when they see images, and hopefully my goal is that, you know, they will never look at meditation in the same way after seeing this movie. Right, I think more than here though, you have to, you seem to be working, especially in the show with a very specific body, you know, 19th century iconic white male artist, Monet Corbett and Monet. And, and it does raise the question of what is, what is your enterprise? It's a conversation, but is it a friendly conversation? Is it a, is it an attempt to revise the canon? Is it, it doesn't have to be one or the other, I don't think it can be one or the other. I think to say that it is one versus the other is to sort of close down the conversation, because it's very open.  What does that mean? You know, what is providing perceptual pleasure and satisfaction and images? And so for me, I'm taking these sort of iconic images and sort of reclaiming the, the space of how you would sort of see black women and beauty. Because in history, even though they had sort of their, sort of moment like La Deshaunet when it was created, that was a particular space for Monet. And reading it in our history now, it's, it's a new sort of idea to really think about what that painting means today. And to remake that painting as these three black women in the window of mama is to sort of transform the idea of these iconic images. What about you, Carrie? What was your, your impetus to making this particular series?  Because, because of a way, because of a way they're not really quote hours to claim. It simply, it simply is what it is. But, but I think that the part that I think is, is critical and really most interesting is that there is a way in which you can have, that you can begin to create alongside of that space, something that is equally dynamic and something equally powerful, equally charged and in a way which you don't normally see black women position. And so, and so for me, what the work has a lot to do with the work that motivates me, the thing that gets me up every morning as I was telling my girlfriend, dad, what was this morning? Was how do you negotiate this space where blackness and black women are not to be seen? I didn't do that. I didn't do that. Right? And that every morning I get up and I know that I have to deal with being an invisible being. Yeah. In my presence. I still don't do that. This is invisible to some people. And so, same space. This is 380 spaces. Yes. And that becomes the challenge of your everyday. Yeah. Is how do you assert that we have a right to be here? And not only do we have a right to be here, but our beauty is here and it's being simply denied. But we are struggling to say no. I won't allow you to strip me of my humanism in this space. Yeah. Not reclaiming it, reclaiming it. Okay. Yeah. And it's purposeful and it has really deep meaning. And so, you know, and I think that there's something really interesting and dynamic that's going on because I'm sort of thinking about these sort of saying things in the same sort of way and also thinking about the way in which that I had to come to grips with the fact that, you know, I am not an A.S. guy. I'm not. And if you didn't create any of this shit for me, to myself as an artist, is to make it for me. Is to make the space for me. And it becomes the most difficult thing that we do with the truest thing, the most oddest thing that I think that we do with our work. So, it seems to be simultaneously critique and active existence and celebration. Celebration is a strange word, but I understand what you mean. Celebration in that sense is strange to me. It's more about just trying to get close to the bone to being real. And then it's not so much a celebration, but rather a meaning of possibility and the breath of possibility. Because I think the way in which we are often looked at is through such a narrow band, such a small sliver of soul that becomes really impossible for the width and the breadth of you to really be seen and understood. And so that, I think, is the thing that gets me really excited about seeing the work that I've seen in contemporary by people like McLean and Hank Wilson and other people that are working in contemporary, Gary Simmons. I mean, they really, they really charge me with a great sense of possibility. It's really quite comfortable. So, in the future editions of the Art History, the guard here, our history survey, we will have Manet, Kerry May, and McLean together. Sounds like a nice show. Yeah, and you guys especially. Absolutely. And universe is just the wrong word, but run them side by side, please.  And I think that, you know, one of the things that happens when you allow for multiple voices and you allow for multiple possibilities. And I think, again, you start to get closer to the possibility of what is true. That's why I've chosen to be an artist, is to get closer to what is true to myself. Because, you know, making an artist an extension of yourself.  I wouldn't love these little rooms upstairs. But you're both so interested in interiors, and you use interiors as these, and often domestic interiors as, I think, almost a stage set for creating a narrative. And I was fascinated by that overlap in your work, as well as your interest in family or creating a sense of family and creating a sense of a narrative of drama within the confines of these small rooms. Can you talk about your mind release? Well, yeah, you're both drawn to the two interiors, and it's interesting. Similar, but slightly different way, I think. Perhaps the same. But, you know, your domestic interiors as a setting for your photo shoots and your actual creation of rooms. But so many things happen, or have the potential to happen within your rooms, within your interiors. And each, everything in the rooms seems to be so deliberately chosen.  You know, it's a totally interesting movie.  That a lot of women work in interior spaces. And a lot of women work alone in interior spaces.  Often, I mean, many, many women, artists have done this from the paintings, photographers, so it's sort of, you know, I think that there's something about really the sort of ongoing examination of the place that we are the most familiar with. It has to do with a kind of a deconstruction and a problematizing and looking at and analyzing of the home space, which is the space that women are for the most part confined to. And you, right, to decorate, to play out, to fantasize around, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, so I think that, you know, there's, there was a wonderful, wonderful exhibition, actually. I think maybe the Whitney a few years ago, maybe ten years ago, called Dirt and Domesticity. It was, you know, also looking at, you know, sort of like the deconstruction of family, family space, household space. So, I think that, you know, for me it also comes out of, out of that, out of, you know, this, and also out of the way of like looking very privately, you know, very privately and very much alone. For the most part, I use my own, you know, sort of ricketing cameras and I photograph in my living room and my kitchen and I did that for a long time. I haven't, actually, in a number of years, but I used to work that way very much.  But for me it's that way of, you know, really understanding like nostalgia and memory and really thinking about when did that have come before me and created these spaces and how they created these spaces and the layer of history that is within those spaces that have come before me. You know, I was really, I'm really interested in sort of the fabrication of the space and how they're made and how they become sort of these artifice for signifiers of memory and storytelling and narrative and just perception of time and how we are, who we are, become individual through pictures, through fabrication of the materials. And I say that because, you know, my grandmother used to have a poster for furniture and sort of those ways of how you decide to decorate a space in sort of these formulas. But the wood paneling is always mentioned in terms of? Well, the wood paneling is, you know, when you think about sort of these fabricated spaces that I work out of from the late 50s and 60s and sort of when, you know, new materials have been introduced into, you know, construction. Wood vinyl.  And once you pull that wall there may be some wallpaper behind it or, you know, or paint and layers of wall paper, which is this history of time of stories that people who've lived there before. So I'm interested in that. The spaces upstairs were all spaces, narrative spaces that were telling a story from the different models that I worked with. How I felt about them, leaving just sort of signifiers of pictures or addressed that they wore during the photo shoots or a wig that I used for the photo shoot, because my spaces are these faux spaces that are just put together for the photographs, you know, and they're not real, but they're meant to be looked at as real when you look at the images. They're very, it's really, you know, they're also tabloids, just thinking about, you know, theater and props and how we sort of think of performances and creating... Is it a background in theater? Oh, yeah. But it's, you know, it's about really capturing a particular time that I remember growing up in space, whether it was my grandmother's home or my mother's space. Well, they're beautifully articulated spaces. They really are. There was a woman walking past me. She was looking at like the cigarette in the ashtray, and she said, yes, yes, yes. And I was listening, I was listening to the A's, and she was doing this really wonderful, wonderful interview with Marcellus. And this play, it was all around the world. And they were asking about, you know, playing in different cultures. He said, you know, I can always get the understructure. I can always get the understructure. But learning them a lot of the line is much more complicated because that's where the culture is. You know? And so when she saw that cigarette in the ashtray, right, and she said, yes, yes. Because it means that residue is sort of the residue of time and space that someone was there. You know, it's the re-sort of walls. It's the footprint that I'm interested in that leads you from one moment to the next. That tells a whole different story. And so I'm interested in sort of those clues and connections. When you look at the streets, that every aspect in a room is contained by someone who is there. The record playing and the background. Or just, you know, a book that was open. Because I'm not interested in sort of having the spaces be as if they were going to be in a window or a window display. Because I want the viewer to feel that they're residing in this space or that they can. They work. Yeah. They work. It has a beautiful resonance. It really, really does a very, very, very power. You know, I was just, there's only one other thing that I wanted to ask you about. Because both of us are having major retrospectives right now. We're major exhibitions right now. I'm doing one. It's traveling around the moment. It closes next year. But it will be this time. So hopefully we'll see many of you there. But working on it was, I think, you know, I spent, but the last three years of my life working on this exhibition. It's worn me out. It's worn me out. So I wanted to ask about this exhibition and how this exhibition took shape. It's very good. How do you feel about what's here and what it means to you to have this exhibition at this point in your career? I think it's, it was very important for me to have it. And I think, you know, you know, I just want to back up a little because when I was inviting to do a show, the idea was to use works that were loaned from collectors. I think we talked about that. It was a traveling show, but how this show came about was initially we were going to do two separate shows. One at the Brooklyn Museum and the one at Santa Monica. And then we decided to... Well, we decided the Brooklyn Museum decided to take a show organized by Santa Monica, which consisted of 16 works, but because Mikalina is our hometown girl and a very important artist, we decided that we would enlarge the show greatly. And we did borrow about 50 collages and those were in those rooms. Then, of course, you made the floor installations and paintings and, you know, a lot of you worked the film about your mother for the exhibition. And the focus, as it was at Santa Monica's, of the article the past couple of years. But it really allowed us, I think, a window into your process and the way that you made it. Yeah, but for me, I don't think of this show as a retrospective or sort of an, I think, an artistic view, a sampling.  You know, my career is, I think, maybe just above emerging artists, but, you know, I haven't really been exhibiting that long, so I think this is a great opportunity to have. And I haven't had that many museum shows. So, for me, it was really important when I did both these shows, Santa Monica and the Brooklyn Museum, that they were going to be new works who challenged myself, my own practice, and what I was thinking about at the time. And I didn't feel like, as the artist that I am, that it was fair to myself to just put work out there that people have already seen. I wanted to sort of push my own boundaries, something that I was making in my studio, and show some different aspects of what I'm working on. Because, you know, so many people at the time were just used to a particular body of work, which were the portraits of most of the women, where a lot of the landscape paintings were not shown, and a lot of the interior paintings were shown. And my studio practice consists of not just painting, but also the installation and photography, that the viewer doesn't usually get to see when they go to an exhibition. So it was really important to show a full scope of who I am and what I do as an artist. One thing I did notice, an interesting coincidence in both of your work, is where you were doing the Kitchen's table series, Carrie, and your next series moved out into the world, the Sea Island series and the Afrofile project. And you, too, were working largely in interiors, and then one of the new directions you took, and one of the new genres you decided to explore was landscape. I was curious about that. I'm wondering if you would comment on that. Oh, I think for me it has a lot to do with like, you know, running around the world. So you're tired of being at home? I'm loving being inside. It does have a lot to do with what I'm interested in, and I've been thinking about architecture for a really, really long time. Really long time. And so it was important to do that work. Work happens because you're in a certain space, a certain frame, certain things that you need to work at. Kitchen's table, which was a wonderful piece to work on, and I worked on it like, you know, every day for months and months and months until it was done, and then it was done, and then it was time to move on. And so for a long time I've actually been outside, I've been outdoors, and trying to figure out ways to be outdoors, and trying to figure out what my real interests are in architecture. So on one hand I'm really interested in colonial architecture, I'm interested in architecture of slavery, I'm interested in material culture and the way in which Southern material culture has articulated itself in its own particular express of utterance. And so the Sea Island series came about in the architecture of slavery, the architecture of, you know, the sexualization of space has been something that I've been interested in too for a really long time. So worked in that area, trying to understand that, and then of course power of architecture and architecture, and its power has been, you know, endlessly interesting as well. So those things sort of keep me kind of moving, kind of moving around, you know, kind of keep me moving around and moving to space in a very particular kind of way. And that, you know, recently I've been doing a lot of work in Rome and photograph museums, photographing myself standing in front of things, that's what I'm doing now to run around and stay in front of stuff. So, you know, museums and thinking about what museums are and how museums function. So, yeah, so I've just been doing that actually for a really, really long time. I think I've been made, like, the interior is kind of an exception in your work. The interior was an exception in your work, as opposed to, although the kitchen table series also was not my name's type, which is another kind of studio. Yeah, and you know, and interestingly enough, I just have to tell you this, interestingly enough, not my name's type came about because I was working with Robert Colescott. Robert Colescott, the painter, asked me to photograph him for the Venice Biennale when he was representing the United States. So he called me and he asked me if I would like to make his portrait. I said, that's an interesting request, he's got a lot of black eyes to photograph. He must have something else in mind. And so, you know, so I flew out to see him and I made these photographs and it was very funny, it's a great story actually, photographing Robert Colescott in his house. But I started thinking about painting. I started thinking a lot about painting, photographing Robert Colescott in his painting studio. And so it was really actually through going back to this earlier question, this first question about an essay on influence on influences, it was really in photographing Robert Colescott in his painting studio that I really started thinking about painting. And then I started thinking about him more, I started thinking in paintings more, I started looking at sort of the people that he'd been influenced by more. And then that led me ultimately, I think, to Manet and then that led me to Julie, not Manet's type actually. And so it was really interesting, I mean that sort of journey, right, you know, that again you sort of work on things and you really need to work on them because you're moved by something when you're introduced to an idea or a concept that you know you can swing the door open just a little further if you go down that path. And so it's been really wonderful working alongside that and thinking about what other artists do, because other artists in their imagination help me to come to groups with my own. But I can't read the New York Times on Sunday without getting up and going to my studio. No, I can't read his accent. You know, like I have to go work. You know, it's like, if these people are working, I need to be downstairs in my studio. But I think it's just listening to you talk about how Robert's thinking about Robert Colescott, how you were thinking about painting, then you're really looking at who he was influenced by maybe today. I think that's what led me to menaing myself by looking at when we were bearded and teased, you know, by looking at those artists and really sort of looking at their performances. I see who they were looking at to develop their own. And I think it's as an artist it's important to do that. I think it's important not to just stop at, if you're interested in a contemporary artist, not to stop at that artist, but to look at who they're really influenced. Because it tells a deeper story of where the work is coming from, whatever the work is called. And also, you know, there's this sort of really beautiful span of play. So that, you know, again, when I think about the canvases that I've just seen upstairs, I love these references to, you know, to matisse, you know, in this, but also the thing that excites me most is not only the play with matisse or the play with menaing, the play with beauty, but it's you're bending those notes, again, back to something that is really totally, absolutely your own. And so it's like being completely aware of history, completely aware of the historical context which you come out of, and that you have this sort of really wonderful sort of kiss to, and yet making you completely around simultaneously. It really is your work with a knot in that direction. Or, you know, taking the best of their work, I think, and playing around with it and this is where I'm going to come up with. Yeah. I think that's important in looking at artists and why you're looking at them to sort of make work that's your own. Because I think, you know, thinking about what does a painter make in 2012? How does a painter sort of look at history and decide that they're going to paint in a particular way?  Like, I think it's really important to look at art and pull from it. So categories are irrelevant? I think so. It's good. Yeah, we mean this question of, you know, what is painting? What does it matter? Doesn't matter. So you're known as a photographer, but your photographer uses text and makes installation and you're a painter who has a hybrid practice that includes collage and painting and film. And you are both filmmakers and have been... Well, I wouldn't call myself a filmmaker yet.  And I was curious about that. And we both work with a fantastic person. You know, working with Tanya, I think she's... Oh, yeah, Tanya's here. We love Tanya. Tanya's always helping us with our worship rate. It's your fabulous act, so she's like... Yeah, I mean, you know, but I actually, I'm sorry to interrupt. I actually started working with Tanya on my film because I knew she was working with you. When Tanya sent an email out to everyone, she had a list of artists that she was working with at a particular time. And I saw that she was working with Carrie Maywebs, and I said, that's great now. On film, I started a long, long time ago. They don't really get shown very much, but because I don't do enough about that. And we'll see what happens. At this point, I think you should do whatever makes you happy.  You know, I'm just trying to figure out a way through my life and really trying to understand what the journey is and how to make the important work on the journey that is meaningful to myself, first and foremost, but certainly to the people that I love and that I care about as well, that has a depth and a breadth to it that asks tough questions of itself and of its audience and of me. And trying to figure out a way that I can make a space for myself and for Black people that is rich and powerful and whole. And if I can do that in photographs or text or in films or if I have to tap dance myself, I think we would all agree that you have done a magnificent job of seeing all of this from. No, I was just going to say, you know, film for me, it's just really wanting to experiment with another medium. And I think it's important to just, you know, have fun with whatever comes to mind and find the best medium to execute your ideas, you know, and just do it. And I would love telling people what to do. You do. But which is how you do it.  So you like directing? Yeah, I enjoy directing and I love bringing people together in a certain kind of way to make something happen. And so it's in film and in video that I actually get a chance to stretch out in a way. And I love working with composers, so I love a lot of composers as well, who are usually doing my music for me and it allows me to use voice in a very particular kind of way that I know of ordinarily get a chance to use it as well. So those are the things that I really like about making film.  Maybe we'll do one together. That would be great. All the experience with filmmaking is the editing process because, you know, just learning about the editing process is sort of that collaging of the images really take out sort of the smallest filming seconds and make it into a story. So did you edit yourself? I actually, in this film, I edited it with a fantastic editor, Tony, Alice and Tony. And so I learned a lot about it, but I finally got my own Final Cut Pro and we'll be editing it. I love editing. That's like the fun part. And putting it together, that structure, you know, the structure. So, yeah, it's so, you know, for me, that's, I think, where the magic happens.   I think editing for me, I think, is one of the parts that I want to change. Thank you so much, both of you. Hi. I want to kind of go back to when we started about race and gender and beauty. And I will start to carry about your really direct statement about how it might disavow, but also you sense a possibility. And I guess absolutely the kind of fracturing that Colleen does in her work at Steer is incredibly stunning. And how you, Brian, made your role to certainly kind of mask her narrative.  Could you talk a bit more about that accent, the kind of specter of the great masters? The acoustics are here, are kind of, are bad. So if you could perhaps short and... What I'm going to take, basically, is a more direct question about how the... How you guys produce your work outside the conversation with the great masters. How you understand Black female figuration. Black female figuration is being, you know, some of the most least protected folks on the planet. And how you understand, separate from the conversation with the masters that's been dominating the conversation, this evening, Black female figuration in your art contemporaries in the current moment. That he actually spoke to... I mean, yeah. No, you didn't. No, you didn't. What I was thinking about is a sense of possibility and internal possibility, self-generated possibility, which is, you've spoken about too. But I'm asking, I guess, a very local, deliberate question about Black female figuration that has no, is not so preoccupied by the masters themselves. You know, like, some more of that. You haven't spoken about that so much, but I'm wondering some of that conversation to be separate from the master narrative so much. Well, I think the... I'm just trying to understand all of it, but it's kind of just a little muffled from this. For me, thinking about a contemporary Black female figuration was actually really interested in a new type of Black female body that's a little more masculine, and what that means in the idea of femininity and masculinity, of sort of androgyny. So that's something I want to explore, I think, as far as if you're thinking of a contemporary Black figuration.  So I guess those categories become a little, I guess, they become a little boxed because I think there is sort of, you know, White figuration, Asian figuration, Black figuration. What does that really mean on the Black body? And I think there's, for me, a new type of Black figuration, which is female masculinity. Happy to be here. Worked really hard to get in here. My name is Imarbe, I'm a photographer, and I simply want to ask you, what were your few points in terms of media influence on Black women and the ideas of beauty? Because that's an area that I'm exploring also in terms of film and interviews and speaking to other women artists. What's the, I just heard, idea of beauty. In terms of media influence, because through your art, you're exploring the female figure and you mentioned, you know, the different influences in terms of different body types and how you portray and specifically you also look at Black women. So what I want to know is, what is your viewpoint in terms of what pushes ideas of beauty for us as Black women? Do you think it's media? Is media made strongly or is it culturally or what develops, what, what directs that?  Because you both work in different forms. Media? Yes. I think for me, it's the models that I work with that draws the notions of sort of variates, what I'm interested in. But you also select models. Sometimes. Yeah, I think it's, I think for me, I see it more of an element of myself in them. And I see myself portraying them and I want to sort of, sort of emulate that sense of who they are in portraiture. Sort of the desire of their beauty and sort of capturing anything. It's this notion of, you know, the perceived seduction that I'm interested in. Of how one walks into a room and sort of enters a space. I'm interested in beauty in that level. A sense of beauty as power, I think. And I think that's why I have a new fascination with female masculinity right now. You know, I was just thinking about, and again, Deb Bullitt's here and has just been, her exhibition on beauty has been moving around the country for the last couple of years. He did a conference on beauty, I don't know, maybe a year ago. I think of all those things and in doing another exhibition, we're rather a conversation that's going to take place in Paris this month. Right? They really sort of target this and look at this, you know, critically.  You know, but, you know, but there is something about, I think, the way in which I sort of process this is that there's something about the beautiful. And there's something about misplaced design and wholeness. And that for me, the thing that is cracked, the thing that is broken within our culture is a refusal to see the wholeness of brown people. And so to the extent that we refuse to see the wholeness of ourselves is the extent to which we are also then made not, quote, beautiful, but made ugly and unsightly, right? Which is why then the media doesn't really carry us very far, which is why we don't really exist anywhere outside of the work that for the most part Black women make. It's a really complicated, complicated problem. It's beyond the question of beauty to really the way in which this thing, this disease mind has really corrupted our surface. And that becomes our challenge, how to make us whole, how to make us complex creatures. Because we are complex. Therefore, how to reveal that. And the other thing that I want to say about this for me, this is, I think, a very, very important thing. So I am turning 60 soon. And I'm so excited. I'm turning 60, so it's about women turning 60. But it occurred to me, it occurred to me a few years ago that for the most part Black women did the Black women. And that very few people are interested really in dealing with Black women. And I was talking to Deb this morning about this horrible thing where this dynamite of young directors come along. She's made a film called In the Middle of Nowhere. It's sort of breathing on things. And it makes two dollars. It makes two dollars. And before, you know, it's been, you know, given, you know, it's sung there, it's like best director, best actor, and best film, and best, best. You know, anything just goes on your nightclothes is before it opens and it generates two dollars. Right? And so a part of the sort of difficulty then of being a woman and being an artist, and being the woman who is interested in brown bodies and presenting those bodies in their complexity, which I believe what we're doing. It means that we are also distanced from something. So this is where I mentioned this question about the masters. We're playing the masters and tap dancing around the masters. And having on the one hand to sort of play a respect to them, even as we forge the territory for ourselves. For me it's a much more dynamic question because it really has to do with how do you situate yourself within the discourse of modernism itself, within the discourse of contemporary art, even as a black woman, and even as you negotiate the black body and black subjects. So because for the most part to the extent that you present the blackness, is to the extent that you're pushed out of the field and out of the range of being considered a contemporary artist, which is really bizarre. But I'm simply an artist and make pictures of black people out there. I hope that you understand what I'm saying. You know, to the extent that you are pushed into this box, this racialized box, is to the extent that you're not considered a serious player in the field of contemporary art. And that your blackness then sets you into another category altogether.  And it's still relegated in a very curious way. But what's your take on that? I'm going to do the wrong thing. I look at the two of you and I see two incredibly successful contemporary artists. Were you around? Oh, you don't think so. There's so many things to talk about that you think that we all might be able to talk about something better than race. What you view this for, because there's something else that we can talk about other than race, right? And so he said, yeah, you know. So I get the review back and that's what it is. That's what it is. That's what it is. And so there's this way in which the work is often reduced, right? It's reduced in all kinds of ways, which is one of the reasons that I was asking Lee about the way in which this exhibition came about. Because I think it raises some really interesting questions. So this may not be your case. I trust it isn't, you know. And I wouldn't want it to be. But I do know that this is real. If this thing that we are fighting against, that we are challenged, is with this idea of what Black artists need, and what Black women artists need, and how they are perceived in a little larger world in a general sense. It's a goal to make Black artists to learn about making art. And I think, you know, it's, I don't really, for say, like to be put in boxes of one way or, you know, it's the whole idea of, you know, saying that I make queer art or something like that. It's for me, it's, you know, I'm, my goal is just for people to look at the work and respond to it. And it has all of these different layers. It has all of that because it's an extension of who I am. You know, and it is Black art. It is queer art. It is contemporary art, but all of those things, I... Yeah. Oh, did you think that I was saying that it wasn't? I was beginning to wonder if you were saying that it wasn't. No, she wasn't. Oh, oh, oh. You can hit me to understand it. Now, I'm really talking about the way I think in which the work is generally positioned in the larger world, and how it's discussed in the larger world, how it's reviewed, how it's written about endlessly. In the larger world, it is distanced from modernism, right? Because, because... I think that's something important. Yes, indeed. That's what I meant. Yeah. That's what I meant. And so, then therein lies the challenge that to bring that current contemporary part of your moment, but to bring this discourse into that arena in an acceptable way. I see three people who have been standing here very patiently, and I, please, I would ask your question. I know, but you should have my titties. She's famous, dad. We're going to start with a quick one. Do either of you teach? Yes. Okay, and the second question is education, undergrad, grad school, post-grad. How important was that for you? How important was education for you finding your artistic voice? Major. Absolutely essential. Absolutely essential. I mean, I think it's so important.  In terms of your art, I have to really quickly, you know, I don't really have a question about space. It's just like, it really identified with me today. When you know you're just like, you know, if you're rolling over and over, and if you just have, you have so, like for me as an artist, I'm really trying to find myself a painter with this and that. But just, it's a space where I can pull from all of these different mediums. And I really see that both of you kind of, could you just talk for us? I think that, you know, I just think that the work tells you what it needs to be done. Work really tells you what it needs to be done. And the best thing that, you know, the best advice I can give anyone is, is to go to your studio and to work every day. That's what I told. My friends and my students, that your work will tell you where it needs to go and it won't lie to you. It will beat you up when you're not nice and you don't go to the studio, you know. So, it's, uh... Thank you, that's just what I wanted to hear. Any more questions? You know, I just got up as soon as we started discussing or I guess coming into, you know, an African American woman, an Asian woman and myself as an African American woman, where we have pretty much the same struggles with identity with, you know, so many things. But I guess that will be too long right now to discuss. However, I have some papers where there were three questions asked and there were, you know, what we're supposed to post in or text are in thoughts about it. So, the three questions were, what is a woman? What is security? And what is not art? So, I was wondering, probably the last one, to me, it's probably very interesting because we have discussed women in general as artists. What is not art for you? What is not art? Maybe we should ask one of the assistant deans of Yale University, what is not art? It's just something I'm...   And, you know, we can take that into deeper places. But I think that everybody does have that possibility. And I think that, you know, as I move, really as I move over the course of my day, through the course of my day, I'm, you know, the pistons are just firing. What I'm looking at and what I'm seeing, what's happening around me is always inspiring, and dynamic, and artistic, and filled with infinite possibility. And for me, the thing is trying to contain my excitement.


Today's training was a series of live voice events with a possible transfer of patients and picking up patients from a non-standard health age of one. This training is imperative to test our individual and collective tasks as a unit and ensure that in a vast array of scenarios we're ready to respond to any medical emergency and provide the best level of patient care we can. We have some really professional soldiers, pilots, medics and non-ray crew members within our formation and they perform exactly how you would expect them to under duress and in a typical training environment. Night operations bring a whole series of additional stressors on the individual crew and on the medics as well. You have a limited field of view, the visibility gets degraded, you don't really have a good contour of the ground so it's very stressful to fly at night and it's harder to find the inventory or the AXPs. We operate in the night on a regular basis as medibac units so we must be prepared to handle those situations which is why we train it. This scenario is designed to show that we can work with U.S. ground forces and transport them to foreign hospitals that fall within NATO. So for example we took patients today from our ground units and moved them to a Bulgarian military hospital where they were seen by Bulgarian military personnel. This shows that we're dedicated to our NATO allies and that we can work together on a regular basis.


This is Dupendra from LinkedIn and I'm the technical lead for the offline data compliance from LinkedIn Bangalore. Along with me today, my colleague, Somia, who is a senior developer for the data deletion in the compliance area will join me in today's discussion. So in today's presentation, we will talk about the various data deletion practices which we have implemented during the GDPR time and the reference architecture and the learnings related to that. So let's begin. Here is a quick agenda which we will cover today. So first we will define what is the right to raise your meaning and what it means for LinkedIn. Then we will also look at the overall LinkedIn's data ecosystem architecture and how the data is flowing from the online world to the offline world and the various other places. We will also touch upon the data scale part. We will also see what all the key technologies and the technology text that which we have used for the overall data deletion architecture. Then we will talk about the offline data deletion architecture and how all these technologies together is helping us to realize the overall right to raise your problem. We will touch upon the some of the interesting use case around the retail filtering and then we will talk about some of the key challenges and the monitoring aspects related to right to raise your. So what is right to raise your. So right to raise your in terms of the GDPR as a legal definition it gives and privilege for the user to say delete all my data. So it's like delete all my personal data with there without undue delay when it is no longer necessary or when the consent has been withdrawn. Right. So this is the legal definition when it comes to the engineering so that meaning we need an ability to delete some specific subset of the data or delete all the data when it is no longer needed. So for an example in terms of the LinkedIn one of the use case for right to raise your is when LinkedIn member closes the LinkedIn account, all the members related data has to be deleted within 30 days of the time. So that's the one of the use case which LinkedIn has defined and the promise which user LinkedIn is giving to all its member. So today's presentation we will talk with respect to that particular case. Now let's look at the overall LinkedIn data ecosystem so this is in reference image which shows how the data is flowing across various online services and offline services. So let me explain that. So when a LinkedIn member from his mobile app LinkedIn app or from the desktop like LinkedIn com is navigating to the LinkedIn website and the app and doing various sort of an activities. It may be changing to his own personal data it may be changing the preferences it may be sharing some content liking some content and many other activities which you can do on the LinkedIn platform. All these activities will internally generate a various amount of data which is captured by the online services. Now when the online services captures the data it has two kinds of various mechanisms to capture it in online stores where in the use of the online stores as an espresso which is an document store we have the MySQL Oracle capturing some of the members data here and then when the user is navigating across various pages doing a lot of activities all this tracking data is also generated in the form of the events. So we do leverage the Kafka technology here and all this tracking data is generated or emitted using the Kafka events. Then there are other set of users which are LinkedIn employees itself which are you know making use of this data and there are like a lot of internal applications which they are using and generating a lot of other meaningful information or the derived data on top of this data or various of the data. So that's like another mechanism and then there are third party services which will also generate the data and that will also come to the LinkedIn data ecosystem. So now if you see this picture when all this online data store gets ingested to the offline word where in this elephant denotes is denoting the Hadoop word basically. So all these database snapshots are getting ingested every day to the Hadoop and in terms of the storage we leverage the HDFS as in storage and on-prem technology. So we can see all the database snapshots every table will be present in the HDFS word and then based on the base snapshot there will be a lot of incremental changes like you like the LinkedIn members updating the preference deleting some records so all these things are also captured as an incremental dump or as an exchange data capture request and already on top of already ingested database snapshot all these updates deletes will be applied. So this is one mechanism where in online data is getting coming to the offline word. The other part where in all the activities the tracking related events which is generated in the form of the Kafka events are also getting ingested to the Hadoop word. We use the goblin as in the data ingestion platform to ingest all this data. Now apart from this in the offline word we also have the data from various other sources as I mentioned like a third party and there will be a lot of derived data. When I said derived data consider an example of LinkedIn recommending the jobs recommendation is there the people you may know is there. So all these jobs and these all these recommendations are provided based on the various analytics job which are running on top of this Hadoop data. Yeah. So now when all the all these jobs are run and then they will also have some meaningful data which is again stored in various other data groups. Some of them are like a Pino search the graph my SQL database and that's how finally when a LinkedIn member is navigating to the LinkedIn.com the user member will see the jobs recommendation and other data. Now when it when we talk about the data deletion perspective when a LinkedIn member is closing the account the data which is residing in the online store the data which is in motion or data which is in a near line pipeline or the data which is resting in the Hadoop world. All the data and even the derived data out of that right all this data has to be physically deleted within the 30 days. So that is the problem statement which we are referring today. Now in the offline world we have the HDFS as in our primary storage and then we are also moving to the Azure so an Azure storage in terms of the ADLS will also will be like another storage where the data will be stored and it has to be deleted. Now here. Yeah. Now let's go to the next slide. So when we see the data scale so LinkedIn has already 740 million members and it's growing very fast. So as I'm talking there will be like many more members already on boarded to the LinkedIn.com. Yeah. So now with this many members we are already at the exabyte scale data which we are processing today. And then at any point of time we see it's like a 2.3 trillion messages which is an estimate number that many messages are in motion. And I'm in that many records that many data records are getting processed at any point of time. We already have 10 plus Hadoop clusters. This includes the Hadoop cluster in on-prem and various data centers and this also and then we also have now the Azure data cluster where we are also lending some of the data. So if we see the data in LinkedIn is as the more and more our onboarding the data is also growing very fast and that makes the overall data deletion problem is a bit complex. Now let's look at some of the technology stack like what are the key technologies which we are using and realizing the data deletion problem. So we mostly we use the key open source technologies where in Goblin provides the ETL infrastructure for us data providing the metadata discovery part. Dali being the data section layer and as Kevin playing a key role of managing the flows and shooting the flows for us. Let's deep dive into all these technologies. Yeah. So Goblin. So Goblin is the recently graduated as in top level Apache project and Goblin is in the distributed data ingestion or data integration platform which provides the capability to ingest data from various heterogeneous data sources to to the you know you can be able to load it to the various heterogeneous destinations as well. So if you look at the Goblin architecture and the constructs which it provides. So this is these are the key constructs which are depicted in this picture and the very beginning the source is the main construct which defines from where the data has to be read. So your source can be a restless survey source can be an online database source can be another Hadoop cluster or it can be an Azure. Now after the source is defined the Goblin provides a way to to distribute the overall source into various tasks. So when I said task consider an example you need to process the data and it is across millions of files which you need to process. So you may choose to process every file as in a just as in a separate task. So that is what task meaning in terms of the Goblin and that is defined by a work unit. So now we have a source we have the various work units which which which will be executed in the form of a task in a distributed environment on top of the yarn which will provide you know the resource and the compute need and all these tasks will be executed parallel. Now if you look at within the task within the task Goblin provides four main constructs. So first part is the extractor. So as we have mentioned from the source now we have the work unit which is part of the entire source which we are reading in this particular task. So the extractor job is responsible for the reading the part of the work unit. Next comes the converter converter basically provides a transformation capabilities. So it is fully pluggable model which Goblin provides so you can actually plug everything extractor converter quality right everything is pluggable. So when I say converter user has the flexibility to plug their own transformation logic the filtration logic and even the schema conversion and many other conversion are possible with the converter construct. Next comes the quality constructs because as it's a data ingestion job so the data quality plays a very significant role. So there are a lot of data validation checks can be done at this step and it is again a pluggable stuff user can write their own data validation mechanism the schema validation mechanism and then you can decide either to write the data or you can filter out the data at the quality step itself. Final step is the right which will finally load the data to the destination the destination can be Hadoop or Azure or any other database. Yeah, so by saying that now from the source all the stars getting executed in parallel and finally at the data public step. So this is the step where Goblin provides the way to do the state management. So now at the end of the job you may have some watermark information or some state-related information so that the next time when you are again running the same ETL job on the same source you can resume from where you have left last time. Yeah, so that this is like in a watermark watermark can be in the form of a timestamp everything. So now this goblin oral architecture which is a distributed ETL architecture we do leverage this architecture for our data deletion practices. Yeah, so if you see how we are extending it for purge as I mentioned the converter step which is a pluggable step here. So we can write the custom converter here and we have the full flexibility to either filter out the data record, change the data record and then do the further processing. So in the subsequent slide we will talk about how we are leveraging this capabilities in our overall data deletion architecture. The next key technology is the data hub. So data hub, what is data hub? So data hub is the tool which provides the metadata discovery. So in LinkedIn all the data sets which is residing in online world which is in the online processing world or in the offline world the metadata of all the data set is present in the data hub. So this is one place where you know user can go and do the data discovery where is my data and find the related data sets and apart from that data have also keeps track of the relationship. So it also has information how the data is flowing. So when you know from the online world the data is getting landed to the offline cluster and from one cluster to another cluster and then various transformation is happening. So data hub keeps a track of all the data set lineage and how the transformation is happening. How one data or one particular column is getting transformed to various other columns and in which form. So this complete data set lineage is provided by the data hub. Not only that so data hub also provides in compliance annotations. So because we need to do the GDPR related data deletion so compliance annotations plays a key role there. So data hub also have the information about for every data set what is the PIA annotations. Meaning for every column how we can identify the PIA data or not. It also has the mechanism to keep the various purge policy in terms of how this data set has to be purged and particular purge key means for a particular data set whether it has to be what is the key based on that the row can be deleted. So the compliance annotation in data hub is then key information for enabling us for the data deletion with respect to GDPR. Next comes the Dali. Dali stands for data access layer at LinkedIn and as we know today there are various file formats, various storage technologies various table formats available. So for an example we have the Avro as in file format ORC part K and then we also have the data in CSB, DHT, XML and various other formats and then on top of that we have the high table format, we have the iceberg as in table format and various other table formats and then as I told we have the federated HDFS layer. We also have data stored in Azure. So there are various storage layers, various file formats and various table formats available and then for a user or the job which is reading and writing the data it becomes a hard problem if the job has to understand all kinds of formats. So Dali plays a very key role there which provides an abstraction for all the data read and write so a user need not worry about what is the underlying format and what is the table format where my data is stored. So whenever the data is getting processed, Dali that abstraction we do leverage Dali in our overall architecture as Kevin so it's again open source as Kevin technology which we are leveraging to manage our overall workflows. So when we when we say the data deletion there are various kind of jobs which are running some jobs are sequentially running some jobs are dependent on other jobs and then there are many flows which are which together will make the overall data deletion complete. So for that this flow scheduling and getting this flows executed in a distributed way as Kevin plays a key role there. So we use as Kevin for the flow scheduling the flow monitoring the flow alerts the SLA part and overall job management so as Kevin also provides the capability for you know enabling us for the real-time monitoring if a flow fails or if a particular data set fails it has a various alerts and events available so that runtime user has a flexibility to either resume the job or redo the entire data deletion so all this flexibility comes naturally with the as Kevin and then it is an key thing which we are using. So this picture is an offline deletion overall architecture and this will talk about how we are leveraging all these technologies together I let Somia to talk on this. Over to you Somia. Hello everyone. So we will check offline data deletion high level design now. Let's talk about all the inputs needed for offline purchase to work. The first one is a delete request so whenever a member ID is in their account we get a delete request in form of Kafka events which is then ingested into offline data lake by goblin job and then a Dali view is created on top of it. As we saw in earlier slide Dali view is nothing but an abstraction so that user cannot access the offline data lake data directly. So this Dali view will act as an input and we create a lookup table from it. Lookup table is nothing but the deleted IDs which we can access which we can have a quick access on given a few set of keys input keys. So this is one set of input for offline purchase. The next one is the actual data that needs to be scanned and then we need to make the data compliant rate. So we have data in Azure, we have data in HDFS so we have crawlers running over all the offline data lakes and we have data set summary every day with the latest partitions that are available in each of them. So these are the data sets which offline purchase will actually work on. So once offline purchase it has all these data sets it goes to the data hub and it gets all the compliance annotations which we talked about earlier. Let's talk about them in little more detail here. So here with compliance annotations data set owners actually tell us how they want their data to be how they want their data to be purged. For example, they can mark their purge policy as data restatement which means we'll actually filter out their rows or to column transformation and take out the confidential part. Or if let's say it's a test data or they don't need it after some days of creation they might actually want it's easier for them to have the whole data set deleted after 30 days. So the market is limited attention. In some specific cases they might want to do it themselves and the market is manually purged but then that is also audited and then made compliant. So this way they actually tell us how they want their data to be purged. So let's say they select data restatement then they have to tell us what each column contains so they do PIA annotations for each column there. So it tells us what ID each column is or a set of ID each column is. Then there is the third thing purge key. Here they tell us if they want a column transformation for the PIA field or they're okay with the whole row being deleted. So once we have these things we take the lookup table that we had created earlier and we compare the IDs and lookup tables in each of the records and then we remove them or we do column transformation as needed. But there might be few cases where the default logic will not work. For example let's say the confidential ID is very deep inside a column or let's say a column value is dependent on another column value. In those specific cases we help data set owners write custom logic which is then plugged into offline purger and then it runs as part of offline purger itself for that data set. Okay let's say the user doesn't want data restatement and they go with limited attention in this case we don't need lookup table and all it's very easy. We just go ahead and delete everything that is older than 30 years. For both of these pipelines and there are a few more manual purger pipelines also. All of these pipelines they emit Kafka events for monitoring purpose and a real-time dashboard is created showing status of each of the data sets all time. And if there is a failure if there is a leak that is detected appropriate action is taken. Okay so this was the hard deletion that we talked about. Let's talk about an interesting use case where hard deletion is not necessary. Let's say a user doesn't at LinkedIn provide an option to user to not have their data be used in ads targeting. So in this case we won't be actually deleting their data but the ads targeting pipeline will not be able to access it. So what we do is at run time in the Dali reader we inject our compliance library. So Dali readers comes in handy here again because it is acting as an abstraction layer and we can also use it to filter out data. The compliance library architecture here is exactly same as the previous one but instead of running it as a bad job we run it dynamically in real-time for that data set. We filter out the non-compliant rows and then we rows or column transformation based on the user requirement and we give the user the results. So this was one interesting use case. Next let's talk about some of the challenges that we face we have faced in past. The first one is which is very important comprehensive coverage of data. So in offline data it's a bit tricky because we have semi-structured data we have unstructured data many file formats and many table formats also like iceberg hide managing them. So it's very important that each of all of the data that is that resides there in some way it is compliant either it is related within 30 after 30 days or it is the restatement is done or manual purchasing it is done. So all of this is collated in a real-time dashboard which shows status of all the data sets. And if we find a leak again maybe if there is an annotation missing let's say or if there is a problem in any of the pipelines appropriate action is taken tickets are raised immediately. The second challenge we have faced is data scale. So currently we are at exabyte level already and we are doubling each year. So it's very difficult to maintain GDPR SLAs with ever-growing data. So what we have done is we have auto-scale model for resources but then it comes with you know big cost on compute but that's what we are doing here auto-scaling our resources. We have splitted jobs also sometimes in past but the auto-scaling has worked well for us. The third thing is purging of data set without schema. So with schema it is easier that like we have seen and like we can identify metadata and data have and it takes care of a lot of things but without schema it's very difficult for us because we have to pass entire files and then figure out the confidential data and do it but we do it for a specific data sets so that they are compliant. The fourth one is violations. So even with all of this in place we can have violations like for example if a confidential ID is very deep inside a column which is marked as log let's say and even data set owner is sometimes not you know aware so they have not annotated it properly. So for that we have few pipelines like sampling, classifier etc which randomly picks up data sets and then run classifiers on them so that it checks basically whether there is any confidential data in that. So these are some of the challenges we have faced there are more but like let's move on. So these are some of the references of the text tag that we talked about this goblin data hub that we use in our pipeline anybody can these are open source text tag anybody can use it to build a similar you know data deletion pipeline architecture. Thank you all that's it from my side thanks for joining me. That was a really great session thank you Bindran Somnow. We have one question from Swapnil he's asking when you're talking about LinkedIn data that should be deleted within 30 days which user data are you talking about so he's asking for some examples of the type of user data. Yeah Can you hear me? Yeah So okay so this particular use case example was the man a LinkedIn member closes the account all of the all of the LinkedIn I mean all of his his or her data right so in terms of in your profile you would have given some of the data and then as you are exploring doing search on the LinkedIn platform there might be some more data as part of the tracking events which would have been collected by LinkedIn platform right so when we say within 30 days the data has to be deleted that means all of this data has to be deleted from all the storage so in this particular today's talk we focus only on the offline only a subset of offline storage but then it has to be deleted from all over the places like the online near line or wherever this data is so it's all


Growing up, you know, my dad served in the 82nd Airborne, and he always spoke very highly of medics.  My name is Scott Hope. I'm a veteran of the United States Army. Being that I was part of their care when I got out, I thought that DAV was a natural transition where I could be part of that continuum of care, building a life for them. It's a very difficult time to be in combat regardless of what you're doing. You don't have to have a purple heart or a decoration for Valor or a missing limb to have PTSD. Through my training with the DAV, I can build them a better life. I can be part of them continue to live to the best and the fullest of their abilities regardless of what their DD 214 says. There are a lot of heroes out there that didn't get anything put on that piece of paper. Nobody's shooting at you doing this job, so it makes it pretty easy to take the time to do it right. I am a veteran and my victory is being able to be part of the continuum of care for all veterans of all generations.