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["New York Close Up"]

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I try to create a traumatic experience.

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I want the audience to walk away feeling
like they can't unsee what they just saw.

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Something that is burned in and lasts,
and you can never get rid of it.

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["Red Hook, Brooklyn"]

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["Doreen Garner Sculpts Our Trauma"]

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I use the body in my work
mostly because of the trauma that I have,

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[Doreen Garner, Artist]

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watching how one small thing
can make the entire body fail.

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I'm from Philly.

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My sister, when she was eight years old,
she had a massive stroke.

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There was basically a blood vessel that burst,

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and she was left physically and mentally disabled.

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She lived until she was eighteen
and then passed away in 2007.

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--This could have used more vaseline.

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When I was younger,

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I would end up spending a lot of time
with her in the hospital.

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I remember one kid that had his leg
in this crazy metal cage

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with pins in his leg.

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All these things that are burned into my brain

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are slowly starting to seep back out
into the real world.

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I'm working on this show,
"White Man On A Pedestal."

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All of my work is focusing on J. Marion Sims,
who's known as the father of modern gynecology,

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but made a lot of his progress through 
torturing Black women--

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three of which are documented:
Betsey, Anarcha, and Lucy.

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So he ended up performing a
vesicovaginal fistula repair on Anarcha

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over thirty times in the course of five years,
without anesthesia.

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He said that Black people
experience pain less

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so he didn't need to use anesthesia on them.

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But it was just an excuse
for him to torture them.

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And if there was a patient that didn't seem
like they would make it through,

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he would just leave them in the field to die.

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--It's weird, this process of basically giving
him a rub down.

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--Because it's like a caring notion, but I
have no care for this guy so...

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--I guess I should just think of it as caring
for my own work.

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His statue in Central Park,

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it's currently up for debate on whether it
should stay there or not.

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I think they should take down the statue,
and they should chop off the head,

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and give it to me so I can use it
for other projects.

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Pearls and Swarovski crystals and glass beads

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end up standing in for
fat cells and muscle tissue.

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It's not about creating a gruesome work.

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It's about creating a work that has
subtle nuances,

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where you don't really completely know 
how to feel,

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and maybe that's what stays with you.

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I'm doing a silicone skin cast on Sims's body--

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peeling that off
and then using that for a surgery

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where I'm performing
vesicovaginal fistula repair

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that he performed on Black women.

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Some crazy shit is going to go down.
[LAUGHS]

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--Yeah touch it, feel it.

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--You can smack his face if you want, 
punch him.

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I ended up buying an endoscopy camera,

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so when it goes inside
people will be able to see

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what's going on inside the body,

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as well as on the outside.

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When you think about ways that
Black people have been used in this country,

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it does just come down to the body.

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Extra sets of hands to do tasks,

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people to take out
your anger and frustration on,

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people to do experiments on--

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just disposable bodies.

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Me as an artist,
I'm operating in a really weird place.

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I'm slicing up the skin,
I'm chopping up the bodies.

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I'm a Black woman horrified by these actions,

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and yet I have to show all these actions,

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so that it's not a situation where people
are able to overlook this information anymore.

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It's not a desire that I naturally have,

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it's just what I have to do.

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[In January 2018, the City of New York decided
to relocate the Sims statue]

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[to Green-Wood Cemetery
in Brooklyn, where he is buried.]

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[The statue will be installed without its
pedestal.]