The hardest thing about looking into these incredibly painful stories in American history
is we have to admit that they happened.
So we're inside the gallery space for Racing Revolution, exploring human injustices through
art.
It's on Governors Island in Nolan Park.
A lot of times when we look at other cultures that are different from us, we don't understand
them and we judge them.
We say that's bad, that's like gross, and so he's saying, you know, when we do this,
it reflects back on us.
That's why he has a mirror there that looks like water.
There's always been ingrained in my teaching a look at how people examine each other based
on things that can create a sense of otherness.
I became interested in how constitutional law was used and abused after the Civil War
with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and I started looking into how they wound up creating
institutionalized racism.
It's a warm anthem to have a name made of skin, am I not allowed joy?
The swelling of cheeks from laughter, instead my worth be two frowned hands exhausted from
being held up.
I don't have a cure for your ignorance, but to keep being so black it eclipses the world
and you have no choice but to watch how brilliant, and worthy, and black I really am.
Sure, some of me think that a poem may not be able to create big change, but it hits
the little steps that matter.
So we perform the poem or we have a poem, some of me did, that can create a dialogue
that will then turn into some action, that will then turn into some big change for us.
Poetry can be used as a tool to shape a world where youth of color can feel inspired to
tell their own stories.
To be able to have conversations about the exploitation of a population in this country,
or to be able to have a conversation about the number of police killings in 2016, and
to have people feel safe and feel connected enough to the space and to the artworks that
they want to open up and share their ideas with me, to me, is a very powerful form of
activism.
If they feel safe in talking here, in a public park, maybe they take that conversation out
of here and they bring it somewhere else.
The artist is saying that when people fight over land, they die and then they go back
to the land that they were fighting over.
So what's the point?
So this room is being taken over by natural elements.
There's all sorts of water damage.
But then there's also this, what looks like a pipe that has either pushed the floor up
or somehow the floor got suspended.
And a visitor today remarked, when I was explaining to her that this artist was born on the Standing
Rock Reservation, that this becomes, it can become a metaphor for the pipeline and its
intrusion on the space.
I don't need people to be on the side, there are no sides, we're all losing.
Just some of us feel those impacts so directly that it's survival.
So for me, my heart is like, to transcend that survival, to be more than just an identity
politic and to say there has to be an institutional change happening.
If we do not have that institutional change, then it doesn't matter what it is to my poetry.
Together we are an anthem, no matter what.
Together we're louder than all our heterosexual fuss.
Together we are bigger than all the worlds unsaid.
Together we're like an animal, off from the dead.
Because we are bigger than the skylines that hold us.
We are bigger than the sirens that steal our hearts.
We are bigger than Boys Town progress, Rainbow Flag, White Day people and bars.
We are bigger than leading this blood to the stars.
So I want to use curating as a tool and I want to explore history.
The documents and the language that leaders used in American history to expose the patterns
of racism that continue to repeat throughout the years, throughout the generations.
George Washington at one point had written a letter at the point when he realized that
he was not going to get that many more patriots to sign up for the American Revolution.
He had to start thinking of new ways to employ people.
And so he says, we might be able to employ 400 Indians if they can be divested of their
savage customs, they may make excellent light troops.
So if we rid the savages of their so-called savage ways, they may be able to fight our
war on our side over their land.
And those battles are still being fought and it's literally happening today in North Dakota.
So this is why it's important to make these connections to them.
Allow people to see how they are, we're just kind of stuck in these continual patterns.
Honey, our hive is built and ruled by women.
But we were once wild.
Honey, look at the flowers.
We have raised them into artichoke, pepper, squash for you, honey.
But you found our hive and renamed it Colony or a factory of yellow, black and brown honey.
We are the silent workers who bring home your food whether or not our honey comes home.
Home was the wildflower that you pulled out to plant your white monoculture in its place.
We had slavery in this country until 1865 and so through that time women are being forced
to have sexual relationships with their masters.
Barbers as the savages are, they never violate the chastity of any woman taken prisoners.
And we can interpret that to, I interpret that to me that they never rape their prisoner,
their female prisoners.
It would be well to take measures to prevent such a stain to our army.
And in Nona Faustine's work, she presents the female body and specifically the black
female body.
The body as a means of objectification and as a means of reproduction.
Nona has two pairs of children's shoes tied around her waist.
And then when I see these empty shoes, I think of the absence of and the disconnection that
the mother had with where are the physical children.
A lot of my work centers around mental health, mainly depression, especially depression and
mental health in communities of color.
There's a lot of time, trauma kind of forms into these mental health issues and so I think
it's really important that we talk about that and to not allow there to be a stigma.
I identify as a cultural worker and by that that means that my art is not separate from
my lived everyday life, from my political experiences, from the ways I experience reality.
A lot of my work to see today is coming from a self narrative, but also as a form of inquiry
about the way the world is run, how do systems of oppression interrogate and involve in my
life, in my communities, as a brown transgender person of color, as somebody who comes from
a migrant family.
I can't separate my aesthetic from my lived experience.
These things, there's a connection here, these aren't separate, like it wasn't slavery
and then jump forward a hundred years civil rights movement.
There has been a current that has been existing this entire time that so few people have been
exposed to, whether it's in school or on the news or in movies and you know, however people
gain their information, there's just not enough out there that's being talked about.
So this is another way to open up a conversation.
Thank you.
