(poignant music)
(awe-inspiring organ music)
(awe-inspiring organ music continues)
- I've spent my entire life making pictures,
so I don't hold any delusions
about the transformative power of artworks.
Not enough people ever see them to interrupt the dynamism
and the challenges we face living from day to day.
But what they can do, however,
is to invite us to imagine oneself as a subject
and an author of a never-ending story
that is still yet to be told.
Now, this is what I've tried to do
and tried to accomplish with words, images,
and colored glass
for right here and for right now.
(gentle upbeat music) (birds chirping)
(stirrer clinking) I came to the cathedral
to have a discussion about the project,
which was to change out the Robert E. Lee
and Stonewall Jackson windows.
I understood it was gonna take a lot of thinking,
especially in relationship
to the transformation the cathedral was trying to enact.
This is a big kind of monumental undertaking,
and you have to figure out whether you're gonna be able
to meet the moment.
(gentle haunting music)
In the founding documents of the United States,
there's a clause that provides for the population
to seek some redress for the grievance that you have.
That's built into the structure of the country,
which means that over time, you're engaged in a process
of revision that requires struggle that's ongoing.
It's always ongoing.
(crowd applauds and cheers) When Harold Washington
became the first Black mayor elected in Chicago,
he said something that struck me at the time,
and he said...
- No one, no matter where they live
or how they live is free
from the fairness of our administration.
- This is how I came to this idea.
It's that "we want fairness, not no foul play."
That seemed to me to be a conceptual relationship
that I thought could do the work
that I want these windows to do.
(gentle haunting music continues)
This is where humidity is gonna give you some fits. (laughs)
- [Fabricator] Is it running?
- No, but the red wasn't completely dry.
- [Fabricator] Oh, it wasn't?
- I'm just curious to see if it...
There's a heating element in that ceramic coil.
- [Kerry] But there the problem is you gotta stand there
with that.
- I can get a chair. (Kerry and fabricator laugh)
- [Kerry] See, that's just as bad.
- It might be hard to see,
but the original concept was done with a colored pencil.
The colors we selected from that palette translated well
into kind of what becomes a living piece of art
that changes every day with the sun and the clouds.
So trying to translate all these different variables
was the most challenging part for me
but also the most gratifying.
(gentle music)
- I chose to use a group
of anonymous individuals
because I think we tend to make celebrities the focal point
of any kind of achievement, when for the most part,
almost all the achievements we experience
are the work of vast numbers
of anonymous and unidentified people
who put in the work on a day-to-day basis.
(pensive music) (traffic honking)
I was born in 1955.
I was alive to experience the assassination
of the president of the United States,
which, for an eight-year-old,
was a shocking occurrence.
Two years after that,
we were in the middle of the Watts riots.
By 1968,
I was a witness to the shootouts
between the LA Police Department
and the Black Panther Party. (chopper blades humming)
The Vietnam War was raging.
Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.
Malcolm X was killed.
So you talk about volatility,
I'm conditioned by that kind of volatility,
and that's just the political volatility.
That's not to mention the kind of neighborhood challenges
that you have to negotiate
in order to make it from one day to the next.
All those things contribute to a perception
of how you move through the world,
survive in the world, and what your expectations can be.
(slow solemn music)
That's the backdrop against which I as an artist
have to conceptualize the imagery I'm gonna produce
and the value I think it will have for the culture.
(slow solemn music continues) They read beautifully.
- It is cool when you walk up the aisle, and you watch it,
and it's a different light coming out
of this bay than all the others.
- Yeah, well, they're different.
I mean, if you...
I mean they're not anywhere near as fragmented
as most of the other images in all the other windows.
They present themselves with a clarity.
It does what I wanted it to do. (laughs)
Formally, the movement from the bottom
to the top is really important
because it's like down here on the ground in the crucible
where all of these sort of needs
and desires are fought for
is where the heat is always generated.
And as we achieve more of the kinds
of ideal conditions we look for,
it requires less of that kind of energy and agitation.
Although in the upper part,
there's a kind of oscillating back-and-forth dynamic
between the colors and the whiteness
of some of the glass shapes
so that even in that upper part
that seems chromatically more tranquil,
there's still an incredible amount of energy
and back and forth going on.
I wanted that too,
that achievement doesn't necessarily mean complacency.
(gentle haunting music) If you look at history,
the success that the United States enjoys is accompanied
by a legacy of brutality,
not just here in the United States, but all over the place.
Out of the crucible of all of that violence,
all the warfare, all the colonial impositions,
out of the crucible of all of that,
we got a chance to live.
And the chance to live that we got makes us obligated
to do whatever we can to guarantee that those processes
that were played out before we arrived
are not repeated in the same way
from the moment we are here on.
That's what the replacement of those windows means.
(solemn music)
(solemn music continues) (solemn music fading)
Hi, my name is Julie Mehretu.
And I was really blessed to be featured by Art21 in 2009.
Susan Sollins was directing at the time,
and I was really fortunate enough to have met her.
What an incredible person to have started such a project.
And the archive of films of artists' practice in the depth of
research that has gone into the archive of Art21 is incredible.
It's an immense resource for any young artist
and any practicing artist who wants to look into
all these various practices and forms of making.
I grew up in the Midwest,
and I know more than,
as does anyone coming from cities that are not either New York or Los Angeles
that are not these primal coastal art centers,
the value of the smaller museums and collections.
And when I grew up, you didn't have the MCA in Chicago,
you didn't have MOCAD in Detroit, you didn't have an art center in Grand Rapids.
There really was nothing outside of the DIA and the Art Institute.
And these were encyclopedic type of museums.
And now, yes, you have many more of these contemporary art museums all over this country,
but many students still don't have access to the form of education and the form of practice
that this archive offers.
And that's what I think is one of the richest aspects of this,
is the kind of depth of education and access you can have into these various practices.
And that's only going to move the whole field forward.
So thank you, Art21.
Thank you Susan Sollins for an incredible vision in having commenced this incredible project,
and I hope that you'll consider to support this immense project.
Thank you so much.