This was a unique situation here in America.
Two people were so far apart until one was the oppressor and one was the oppressor.
Within a very short period of time, of 30 years, those same people were trying to work things out and live together.
In this country, there's not much artifacts that are strictly made by African people.
We had the idea of opening an African bead museum.
If we were 200 years back in the past, this would be a pharmacy.
Because bees were looked upon as being medicine and magic.
And how that worked, the person in the community, if you came to him with some kind of personal, emotional sickness,
he would prescribe a bead for you to wear and that would make whatever those symptoms would go away.
Bees also define status in the community.
The bees in here are not the ones that's for the collection, they are still in boxes.
Once we discovered we didn't have enough money to open this museum, we started putting artwork on the building.
The beads are sold to underwrite the cost of the exhibit.
The property was donated, the only thing I have to do on the property is pay the tax.
I can afford to just not be concerned about whether or not I'm making a lot of money.
One day, I'm out there on the field, I picked up this rock, had this piece of iron protrude out of it, and it had stained the rock.
So that began the genesis for the exhibit out there.
Now, rust is a state of deterioration.
So why would an iron want to teach rocks how to rust?
That's where the metaphor come in.
If you emerge yourself in someone else's culture, guess what?
You lose contact with your own culture, so it begins to deteriorate.
With this installation, there was an opportunity there to present a history without that mental roadblock,
because you just get on a plane to go to Africa.
So in the mind of the people, there's a definition of what an African is and what an African is not.
So I needed a way to get past that and just tell the history of the people in such a way that no one would leave offended.
Rocks set up their own school and began to teach themselves how to rust.
So the moral of the story is if you're going to oppress people, you need to be careful about what you're teaching yourself.
You just may be teaching yourself what your oppressor wants you to learn.
The most important thing is to communicate that you have to be respectful of different cultures.
You have to work out differences that you can move forward with.
The principle of the enkissi was carved out of a piece of wood, placed at the edge of the community,
and to empower it, you place iron in it.
We asked this enkissi to stop the graffiti artists from tagging this place,
and also that the city would not see this installation.
We've been here so long now until we're in a partnership with the city, an unofficial partnership,
because we bring a lot of positive press to the city.
We put all this stuff up and it gained the attention of the world.
It's a humbling feeling to realize that you can do something that touches a lot of different cultures,
a lot of different lifestyles, people from all over the planet,
never thought that this would appeal to the palette of the world.
It just never came up.
