[DRUMMING]
[KEVIN BEASLEY] --There's not going to be a beginning...
[DRUMMING]
--I think that's enough to start.
[DRUMMING]
[CLAP]
So right now,
I've been putting a lot of energy into an exhibition at the Whitney,
which is my first major solo exhibition here in the city.
The project is multiple parts.
There is a sound installation,
that is rooted around a cotton gin motor,
and three large sculptural works.
The work really comes out of an experience I had at a family reunion
in Valentines, Virginia, in the summer of 2011.
I drove down from New Haven.
The property has a meandering road that leads to the house.
I look up, and I see the fields are planted.
I stopped the car and I looked,
and I was like, "Whoa, what is that?"
And I rolled the window down, and I saw that it was cotton.
It struck me in a way that I couldn't quite wrap my head around.
Emotionally, it was too heavy.
Mentally, it was too heavy.
I felt like I hadn't reconciled something.
I was like, "Why am I so mad at this plant?"
This plant is not doing anything other than growing and being beautiful.
I felt like, okay, there's a lot of unpacking that has to happen.
--You know, I want to actually point to this cotton here.
--This here has all been ginned.
--This is all cotton from Virginia,
--Valentines, Virginia.
Using cotton, raw cotton, as a material is really important,
because as materially-oriented as I am,
it's all because there is a context for those materials.
For the exhibition, there will be three large sculptural works.
I've been calling them slabs, because of their relationship to architecture.
They're made from wildly different materials.
--This is a sweater.
--It's a Yale cotton,
--really nice, preppy sweater.
--And then these are some durags, some blue ones.
--For this they're going to represent a river,
--or some sort of flowing water.
Every material has some sort of history or life that it's lived.
They become ways of telling stories.
--This is a collar from my cap and gown, when I graduated from Yale.
When I think about cotton, it takes me everywhere.
You think about politics.
You think about social relationships you have.
You think about economics.
Reparations.
It all just unfolds and is laid out.
These pages come from an atlas of the Transatlantic slave trade.
It's remarkable that these records have been kept for so long
and in such detail.
But it's also indicative of trade and commerce.
You keep track of every single thing, every movement,
because there's money and there's capital involved.
But these were bodies.
Being a Black person in this current state,
that’s what you're encouraged to do-- is to move on.
Like, "Ok, there's been time."
"There's been space," right?
It's a false narrative.
But it also is one that you feel the pressure from.
That to me is an essential aspect of making sculpture.
You have to deal with its materiality.
These works, I think, they demand that.
They demand you to confront them,
because they're confronting you.
[DRUMMING]
[DRUMS STOP, SILENCE]
I was searching for a cotton gin.
I had cotton, and I was thinking,
maybe I could make t-shirts, or I can make garments.
I went on eBay,
searching for a small hand-held, hand-cranked thing,
and the first thing I came across was an ad for this large cotton gin motor.
I felt like it was telling me what I needed to do.
The cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney in 1794.
What it does is it separates the fibers from the seeds,
which was the most time-consuming part for slaves.
People thought that it would decrease the number of slaves.
But it actually had the opposite effect,
because more land was acquired, plantations got larger.
It actually increased the number of slaves.
The cotton gin motor is encased in a sound-proof glass chamber,
and primarily came out of this decision to be able to experience
and see the motor running, and not hear it.
That came out of a conversation with the former owner,
where, when I asked him about what it sounded like,
he couldn't articulate.
He didn't have the words to really describe that sound.
It was really something that you had to experience for yourself.
--Okay.
Sound has always been important to me.
It has increasingly become a way for me to process the world.
Sound is just as physical and tactile as any other material.
[PROCESSED SOUND OF COTTON GIN MOTOR]
[SILENCE]
How do you deliver that physicality, or that tactility of something you can't see,
or something that you don't feel in a traditional way?
[PROCESSED SOUND OF COTTON GIN MOTOR]
It shakes your insides.
You feel the vibrations.
Do people want to sit and listen to this?
Do they want to take the time to consider
what that sound is, and where it is coming from?
I'm interested in people asking what their relationship is to this material--
to see a wall of cotton that comes from a really specific place,
the American South--
just to think about what their relationship is to that,
and how do they feel implicated, if at all.
Are we really taking the time to process and understand these things?
So I think setting up a scenario where people can take the time
is as much as I can really offer.