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We are at, in the 21st century,
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at the head of an ever-expanding past
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or an ever-expanding history.
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We only move into the 21st century
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on the foundation of things
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that have been established long, long ago.
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The principles that govern the way
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visual representation works
are still the same principles
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that governed the way they worked 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, two thousands years ago.
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Makes perfect sense to me
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to go back to the origins of these things
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and pick up from there,
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to take up the challenge, really,
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to find another way to make
these things seem fresh,
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even if they are not.
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The painting "Many Mansions,"
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which I finished back in 1995,
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it's very classical structure
that the imagery is hung on.
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When I started out, the
artists that I really admired,
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people like Jericho, that whole
genre of history painting,
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that grand narrative style of painting
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was something that I really
wanted to position my work
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in relation to.
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And so in order to achieve
a similar kind of authority
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that those paintings had,
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I had to adopt a similar structural format.
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I think in general
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the paintings have been really well received,
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but there's a lingering controversy
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around the sort of unequivocally black,
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kind of emphatically black figures.
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I wouldn't have done them if I didn't feel it,
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but I tend to think having that extreme of color,
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that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful.
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And powerful.
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The first painting I did was way back in 1980,
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was a painting called "A Portrait of the Artist
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as a Shadow of His Former Self."
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and it was the first time
I had used this simplified,
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kind of reductive representation
of a black figure.
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And so that painting was the one
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that established the black figure
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as a mode of operating for me.
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What I was thinking to do with my image
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was to reclaim the image of
blackness as an emblem of power.
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And I think it still functions
pretty much that same way.
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(somber organ music)
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I do a lot of different things,
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but I don't find any of them incompatible,
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because they all sort of reinforce each other.
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It's like whether I'm using
film, video, or anything else,
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either I'm working with a set of conventions
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that have already been established,
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or I'm working against a set of conventions
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that have already been established,
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but the primary source
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of my ideas about visual representation
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come from pictorial
representation through painting.
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This light is actually going to sit
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near here with a big sun on it.
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(light switch clicks)
So it's gonna have its own light source.
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Hi, can you give me a hand?
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Because I want to push this back.
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These houses actually are
part of a project I'm doing
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for a show at the Columbus Museum,
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entitled "Illusions of Eden."
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The theme I've chosen to work
with is the theme of home,
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and essentially staged it.
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What I'm looking at, in a way,
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is how impenetrable those places are
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to people who are not on the inside.
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The whole idea of us really being
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in some ways obsessed at this point
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with penetrating that wall,
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finding out what other people are doing,
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what's going on in their lives,
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what's going on in their houses.
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And is what's going on in their houses
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what we expect to be there?
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(train rattling)
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This is, it's live, all the way live.
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It is.
(overlapping chatter)
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This is the Bruce household.
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Oh, yeah.
(overlapping chatter)
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Oh!
(guests laughing)
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Somebody's got to
take up for your mother.
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Yes.
There we go.
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But I didn't know it at first.
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Now, Kerry, I don't have them.
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Go ahead. Go on.
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That's a favorite.
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(Kerry laughing)
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This was for my 74th birthday from Kerry,
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and it says, "What did you
get Super T for her birthday?"
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You see how super I am?
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Super T!
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It says, "Lots of love."
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"Lots of love," and I like that.
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The defining experience I had
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that made me understand
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that being an artist was what I wanted to be
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was that my kindergarten teacher
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kept a scrapbook of old photographs
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she had clipped out of magazines,
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Christmas cards, Valentines cards, you know,
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all manner of greeting cards, advertisements,
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and things like that, and she kept that scrapbook,
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and it was something that she only made available
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to the kid who was best behaved that day.
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And if you were really well-behaved,
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you got to look at that scrapbook
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while everybody else took their nap after recess.
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And it really was that book.
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It's like the day I got a
chance to look at that book,
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it really changed my life,
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because I sat there looking at the book.
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I mean, with tears in my eyes,
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I mean, literally with tears in my eyes,
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thinking that, "Wow, this is just so amazing,
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and that's what I want to do.
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I want to make pictures like these.
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I want to make pictures that affect other people
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the way these pictures are affecting me."
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I don't have a date on this card,
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but it's an early collage, just says "beautiful,"
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and it has a black figure.
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And I remember asking Kerry
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did he mean to have that spot there.
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But he did.
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(all laughing)
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And so that's how I began to understand
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the many complexities.
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When I was in junior high school,
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I got a summer scholarship to take a drawing class
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at the Otis Art Institute.
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The drawing teacher had a book
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that he put on the opaque projector.
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It was "Images of Dignity: The
Drawings of Charles White."
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and he showed us those drawings,
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and I had never seen anything like it before,
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because prior to that, almost all of the artists
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I had encountered in art
history books were European.
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I thought, "Wow, this is just amazing."
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He says, "Well, you know,
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Charles White's got a studio upstairs."
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And he said it was okay for
us to go into the studio
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and see some work in progress.
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You got to see the process.
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You got to see how ugly a drawing can look
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before it was brought to this point
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of refinement and finish.
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That was what was really interesting to me.
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I mean, seeing these stages.
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And then, yeah, that's...
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(both laughing)
Let's see what happens.
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Are you sure?
Well, you got nothing to lose.
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The initial images,
the underlaying images
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all come from photographs of my family in Cuba.
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They start at about '38 and
go right up to the revolution.
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How do you intend now to incorporate
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the present moment?
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Is that important at all?
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That's a good question.
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Probably a dumb thing to say,
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but I hadn't really thought
that all the way through yet.
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That's not a dumb thing to say,
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but it's just the kinds of questions
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I would be interested in asking
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and hearing some reflection on.
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Part of what I'm always interested in seeing
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when I come to the museum
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is not really how refined or
how finished a work can be,
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but I'm really interested in showing,
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especially to my students,
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evidence of the artists' thinking
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and evidence of the artists' process.
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Some of what's evident in a painting like this,
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an unfinished painting, is that it always,
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it reminds me of just how
difficult making a painting is.
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It confirms the suspicion that I always had
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that these things don't come
into existence by magic.
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I'm gonna take this out, partly because,
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when you're thinking about the
way to organize the painting,
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there's some structural considerations
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you have to keep in mind.
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This is definitely the kinds
of images you're working with.
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They will actually tell you
how to make your painting.
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This is essentially how I work on my stuff.
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I'm always referring to some other source
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to give me some clues to how things in my own work
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can be organized better.
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Well, what I'm doing right now is actually
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I'm actually doing a comic strip in newspaper form
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that I could use for a particular installation
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at the Carnegie.
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What I hit on as a subject was this idea
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that when you go to the
museums to see African art,
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those symbolic representations
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of the heroes seem pretty inert.
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The tradition from which they come
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doesn't have the same kind of currency
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that the tradition of Greek
mythological heroes has,
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although there are parallels
between those two traditions.
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And so I thought what I would do
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would be to take those African sculptures
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and re-animate them, in a sense,
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And make them into the super heroes
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to become like a new Luke Skywalker
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or a new Darth Vader or a
new Batman or a new Superman.
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Now, when I was growing up reading Marvel comics,
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the X-Men, the mighty Hulk, Spider-Man,
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all of those characters were
amazing characters to me.
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And so what I'm actually doing
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is kind of reverting back
to my childhood, I guess.
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I thought what I would do with this project
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was to take a form that's in some ways
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already undervalued in America,
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take a subject that's under-represented
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and try to find a way in which
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we can carry these traditions into the future
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so that they don't have to just dissipate and die.