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