Lonnie Graham | Ep. 8

Welcome back to the Photographers of Color Podcast, I'm your host, Aaron Turner, research fellow in photography here at the University of Arkansas School of Art. I'd like to start off by thanking the School of Art for making this podcast possible. As you know, this podcast explores what it means to be a person of color, working with in photography and other lens-based media today. A guest for episode 8 is Lenny Graham, Professor of Art in the School of Visual Arts at Penn State University. Lenny Graham is an artist, photographer, and cultural activist whose work addresses the integral role of the artist in society and seeks to reestablish artists as creative problem solvers. Professor Graham is formally acting as Associate Director of the Fabric Workshop in Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Graham also served as the Director of Photography at the Manchester Crasman Guild in Pittsburgh, an urban arts organization dedicated to the arts and education for at-risk youth. Their Graham developed an innovative pilot project, merging arts and academics, which were ultimately cited by then First Lady Hillary Clinton as a national model for arts education. Professor Graham also served as an instructor of special projects and/or historian for the original Barnes Foundation in Marion, Pennsylvania. In 1986, Professor Graham authored a project titled A Conversation with the World, which has been commissioned in various iterations and numerous countries around the world. A book of this project was published by Dad's Press in 2017. Graham has been the recipient of a national endowment of the arts, Pew Charitable Trust Travel Grant, numerous Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, and also a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. During this episode, we talk about various stops alone away from London. The time he spent at the Manchester Crasman Guild in the original Barnes Foundation, his numerous community projects, his philosophy on the artist being able to use the community as a pilot, and how that ties into the role of the modern artist. Now further ado, here is my conversation with Lenny Graham. Enjoy. Lenny, thank you so much for taking the time out to do this, I'm really excited to speak with you, I've been looking at your work for a number of years, so it's just exciting for me to finally get to sit down and do this with you. Thank you. Lenny, can you tell me about your upbringing, where you grew up, and how you came into your first camera, and art painting overall, how you got into that? I was born in Cleveland, I grew up in a little town in southwestern Pennsylvania called seldom seen, and I, well, whenever I was very young, about four or five years old, I started painting, I guess, as every young person does, and realized at that moment that I wanted to be an artist and informed my family about this decision, at which point they immediately told me that I had to be the best artist there was, and that I had to be really, really good, and from that moment, just continued to support whatever effort I put forth. When I was a little, maybe a couple of years later, so this is still like the late '50s early '60s. I guess Dr. Land had just introduced the Polaroid Land Camera. My uncle, the people that I was living with there in seldom seen, came home from Gibson Camera in Charlotte, and had this, you know, what to be looked like, this huge machine, because I was only three or four feet tall at the time, so, you know, and sort of left that they were on the table, and I immediately, you know, all started opening every little door and looking at every nook and cranny, trying to figure out how this thing worked, and where, you know, and what it was, and he, you know, very patiently gave me proper instruction as to the use of the thing, and that was my introduction to Polaroid. And here, I don't know, 50 years later, more or more, 60, 60 years later, I'm still using Polaroid film, and, you know, to create portraits, so, yeah. What is it about the Polaroid film that you enjoy? Well, like everybody else, I mean, in those days, there was no such thing as digital capture or digital output, in the way that we understand it now. So, you know, first, the whole seduction was, you know, you wait 60 seconds and you get a positive image, which was, you know, sort of wonderful and sublime. And then, as time passed, I worked with, you know, other photographers who used intriguing processes, like alternative processes, like Albeumann and, you know, printing out paper, where, you know, these photographers could basically just, you know, shoot a logic by 10 negative and process it, and then take that negative and put it in a contact printer, or, in this case, like a dozen or so contact prints, leave them out on the patio. And while we were sitting and having tea, you know, sort of check the progress of these things, and, you know, in a hour, half hour, 15 minutes, depending on how sunny it was, you know, go to one of the contact printers and pull out these beautiful Albeum and prints. So, I, you know, the closest thing that I could do to that because my negatives were tiny, they're only four by five inches. Using Polaroid Type 55 was, you know, to do, to, yeah, use Polaroid. So, you know, so I'd get, and the other, the other sort of wonderful thing about, about that film is whenever, whenever I would use the film, or whenever I would encounter individuals, because even, even back in the 60s, it was like as a party film, or like a party camera, like the Polaroid Swinger and the SX70, and all of those, you know, iterations of Polaroid. And beside being, you know, having, like, incredible value in industry, which is probably their primary clients. You know, you could, the commercial, the consumer commercial market was, you know, sort of ripe for it. So, you take your Swinger and go to a party and, you know, click off, you know, a packer to a film, and, you know, other artists were using this thing, like the tool that should have been, you know, like, as a creative tool. So, it was just that, you know, you see something, and it was sort of the epitome of photography, right? At the point of inspiration, you see the image, you know, you push, you get the machine, you push the button, and instantaneously, you've got the thing that you were most inspired by at that particular setting, which is quintessential photography. That's why the thing is so seductive, because beyond any kind of description, beyond literature, which is like the closest thing to photography, beyond any other descriptive tool, you have this meticulous narrative of what it is that inspired you, and you're able to make a record of that, and then, you know, make it with, if you're using a negative, use it again and again and again, and with the Polaroid Type 55, I was able to produce a negative, then with the people that I encounter, give the positive to, you know, the individuals that would sit for a portrait, and then I could have the negative and come back and make an addition of prints, or use them, you know, use them for exhibition purposes, or publishing or whatever. So, that's something that DiWood Bay talks about, and if you're his new books, did you, and DiWood Bay, I know you've worked together, did you all ever sit down and sort of talk about the Polaroid at all? No, I've had the pleasure of, you know, knowing DiWood for many years, and we worked together once on one project that took place in Eatonville, Florida, but we've never enjoyed that kind of sort of wonderful camaraderie where, you know, you can actually, yes, I guess that people imagine, you know, artists sitting around, sitting around in a cafe with a you know or some espresso and talking about you know art yeah or you know other photographers yeah that would and I've never had that although you know we're great acquaintances we've never had that and I certainly respect these work but we've never had the opportunity to do that I hope you all get that opportunity at some point another thing I want to ask you about is you study at the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Halifax San Francisco Art Institute and sort of alone this educational path you've met people like Robert Frank in Larry Sultan so through all your experiences there how were they and how did you know photography was for you well I knew photography was for me when I picked up that Polaroid camera back in the in the 60s haven't you know though the photographers that you just mentioned you know in addition to you know well yeah Robert Frank so I went to school at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design where June Leaf Robert Frank's wife was drawing teacher and you know through the course of my drawing classes and my studies there Robert would come to the school you know either to you know meet with June or to you know maybe present some of his films so it was in that way that I you know that I met Robert so those were the people that I was able to sit down and have you know coffee with that kind of thing I was actually supposed to watch his house while they went to Florida but instead I changed my mind and went to California where you know I met Larry Sultan and John Collier and Ansel Adams and Linda Conner and those kinds of people Hank Hankwessel Jack Fulton Angela Davis was my social studies teacher so yeah so those are the people that I was sitting down have them you know and then later on miraculously I don't know if we'll talk about these folks later but you know I've been I've had the great fortune of being able to sit down and share many many meals and many many good times and do collaborations with other you know modern artists that are you know these prominent artists that are working in the field now like like Carrie weems and I did a collaboration together and I enjoy a great friendship yeah we're gonna talk about those later absolutely another thing I want to ask you sort of moving on from that during most of the 90s you worked at the Manchester Craftsman Guild in Pittsburgh which I read is what's dedicated or is still dedicated to arts and education for at risk youth so how did this come about to be with your position there and what was the overall experience like so I had been living in California for some time and you know crossed you know it's California became a little a little bit tedious and my relatives my family meant a great deal to me they mean a great deal to me and had been sort of you know dwindling because you know you're talking about people like my grandmother was born in the early 1800s or 18 1860s so you know and she lived to be like over a hundred years old so her last child was my father who was born in the early 1900s so all all of his you know 15 or 16 brothers and sisters who came before him were all sort of passing the way and I felt a great obligation to all these people who as I mentioned earlier had done nothing but support every effort that I made in my career so you know here's my family who had sacrificed everything and who had you know been completely supportive of an artist right in this country and you know and I was like roaming around the world and you know fooling around out in California so not to be completely irresponsible came back across the United States by car on Thanksgiving like during Thanksgiving week and arrived back in the eastern part of the United States in some sort of horrible snowstorm with really to be with my relatives but you know no prospects of a job or anything like that but miraculously my life is full of miracles I I was at that spring in the garden you know tending to the little berries the strawberries and the telephone rain and it was the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts who somehow figured that I was you know in don't ask me how any of this happens that I was in Pennsylvania and they wanted me to come and speak at an art and education conference because at the time Pennsylvania had this thing they had an artist an education program where you could be a resident artist in any one or any number of public schools that existed in the Commonwealth so I went over I gave a presentation I became friendly with the people that ran the Pennsylvania Council Philip Horn and Kimberly Camp more specifically David Stevens was there at the time and that's significant because you know Kimberly Camp and I would become very close over the years we still are and she would come later to become the press well she built the of course she built the African-American Museum in Detroit and would go later to build the to start to work in the Smithsonian Institution and to become the president of something called the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia yeah but at that time she was at the Pennsylvania Council and she I think she was working I think she had just made the transition to the Smithsonian where she knew Dr. Grace Hampton Dr. Hampton was a representative for the National Endowment for the Arts and at the time they would do later on I was able to serve on the council as well but we so we do these side visits and Kimberly called up one day and said you know Lonnie I need a ride can you can you help us get over to the north side of Pittsburgh and I said sure so I picked up her and Dr. Hampton to do this side visit we wound up at the Manchester Craftsman's Guild I met the man who was running it who still runs it named Bill Strickland from the Carthage Fellow and he invited me the short story abbreviated story is that he invited me to have a show there at the Manchester Craftsman's Guild and I did well he also invited me to use the dark room to use the facilities the ceramic studio to basically make myself at home almost as if I were an artist in residence and I kind of was so I would show up frequently and these young I think they had like maybe six or eight people there at the time these young people that would come down from all of our high school and they would you know sort of come in the dark room and splash around and ask what I was doing and I would explain it to them so my afternoon they'd come down after school so my afternoons were taken up with helping these young people learn about photography never finished my show because I wound up volunteering you know to work with these people and they you know Bill came and suggested that you know I might be able to be you know to establish a more stable position at Manchester if I could get more students to come in because they were developed they were cultivating a relationship with the Pittsburgh Public School Board so basically I said to Bill I said well how many how many do you want so the program went from like a half a dozen kids to like 300 and some right in the course of a month because you know because of Polaroid like you know who doesn't want to have their picture taken exactly then who doesn't want to have it taken again right so you know I I'm working out there with this Polaroid 55 film like I'd go out into the neighborhoods and into these schools and I'd set up the camera I share the kids how to do it they want more and I said well you know here's the negative you can make as many as you want but you have to come to my dark room so so we provided public you know transport but school bus transportation for these people they come over work in the dark room they you know told their friends about it so we had like an enormously successful program and well it's still going on some of the students that I trained are now instructors they're in Manchester okay and the thing became because I it was at a time I mean I understood how education had to change I understood my staff me and my wonderful staff and Bill understood how we needed to be able to adapt educational needs to what students demanded because it's all always changing. So you can't just have like one, like the sort of factory system that they have now, you know, you can go to any school anywhere in the United States and most of the world. And the students are all lined up in a row. The teacher stands in the front. And this is kind of, you know, a factory educational system. But learning doesn't always take place that way. And the thing that I list, the thing that I heard when I was listening to the students was, you know, they wanted to be someplace alive. You know, so I got them out of school for a half of the day. And we went to places where they could see what they were learning about. And I worked with the educational, with the school board and with the teachers. And if we're, if it was a science lesson, you know, we went to the river. If it was a history lesson, if it was a civics lesson, we went to the courthouse and met the judges. If it was a history lesson, we'd go to the music, we'd go to the sites where these things were, they were able to write about these things. And then of course, they're always taken pictures and they're writing in it. So then when Harvard came to do the case study, right? You know, they had these will follow us around with clipboards, you know, taken notes and you had to ask him questions and, you know, being very polite. And one guy sort of sat me down and he said, you know, how's it going? And I said, I don't know, I'm very afraid. And he said, then I said, what do you, you're the guy with the clipboard? I said, what's going on? And he says, well, he says the students don't think they're learning anything. And I said, okay, well, I'm a failure. I said, I'm going to go back to California. And he said, no, no, no, he said, he said, think about this now. He said, when these kids come in, he said, do they know, do they know how to work with the camera? And I said, no, he said, do they know how to put together a portfolio or a frame or hang a show or an exhibition? Do they know how their work relates to what they're learning academically? And I said, no, he said, but, but they do now. They can do all of that, right? And I said, I said, well, yeah. And he said, so you've taught him all this stuff, but they don't know that they're learning. And I thought, okay, well, that's not so bad. He said, yeah, he said, that's, you're doing, you're doing just fine. And I said, okay. So then shortly after that Hillary Clinton came and named the place a national model of education. And in the meantime, I'm trying to do this like this, this, this, this living, because Bill had the living masters of jazz series. So he had this beautiful auditorium in Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach, and all of these guys would come in and play in the auditorium. And I said, okay, well, I need to have a living masters of photography series to keep the quality of art, to keep it, you know, so I can keep up with Bill. I started to invite Lorna Simpson and Kerry Reams and Deborah Willis and all of these people to come and work with the students, you know, mostly women, they're a lot, mostly black one. And I think Shirley Chisholm came, you know, all the, I get anybody that I could get to come in. Yeah, I would get to come in and work with the students. And the prerequisite was that they had to be nice. And they had to, you know, want to work with kids. So it worked out. So that's basically how I met like a lot of the people that I would eventually become very good friends with. And that's how I wound up at the Manchester Craftsman's Guild for those, for that decade, for those 10 years. Wow. And thinking about the Manchester Craftsman Guild, is this where the source of the story comes from your TEDx talk where you're talking about the student you're working with, his name was Charles. And then like during that TEDx talk, you talk about artists are in its most fundamental, fundamental fashion, communities and basic needs, education, housing, communication, the students in these, these schools being creative problem solvers. And then you got a community on the other side with needs. And so how do you get those to, to different institutions to talk to one another. And then within that you talk about enlightenment that takes place from interaction and then that interaction dispels fears. It brings people together, fosters understanding. And then you essentially basically give like your thoughts on what the role of the artist is, you know, art should involve sharing ideas, experiences and insights. Do you have any response to that or thoughts on that? Well, yeah, I mean, I think about it all the time. Okay, but, you know, yeah. So what happened? So here, here I, okay, so from, you know, from a very early age, you know, I had sort of grown up using photography, I had grown into trying to be a painter, exhibited very early in, you know, county museums and, you know, local, like city museums and that kind of thing. And as a painter, and then whenever I started to go out into the world, traveling to Africa, you know, East Africa, Kenya, and that kind of thing, I immediately start to look around for other people that are like me, right? I'm looking for artists, I'm looking for people that are, you know, I couldn't find anybody who was stretching canvas or, you know, had the, the means that they're disposal, the luxury of being able to be as indulgent as, you know, a Western artist might be. And that sort of bugged me for many, many years. So, you know, trying to figure out how art fit into people's lives, I wasn't seeing it, it wasn't there. You know, every now and then, you know, you'd see a muralist or you'd see somebody who, you know, in some other culture that had adopted, you know, Western ways of personal expression, but it wasn't common, it wasn't, it wasn't, it just wasn't, it wasn't the default, it wasn't what people did. Until, as I, as thank you for bringing up that TED Talk, I was working with this guy and who was basically, I didn't understand the way that he was working, but, you know, suddenly one day he explained that what he was doing was not about him had nothing to do with him. He didn't care basically. He was worried about people in the community that would be able to see the work that he was doing and understand what was happening in their community. The work was for them. The work was about them. So suddenly I understood what I had been seeing. For decades, whenever I would travel to these other communities, I was seeing work that was being produced by the people that were living in those communities for them. If there was a, if there was a baby, if there was a child, if there was a wedding, if people, if there was a conquest, if there was, you know, people that, you know, brought back food, art was being, artists were involved. People, people, the artists were, were solving problems in, in the community for the community. Whenever I traveled to Papua New Guinea, if there were, if there were artists who were producing like clothing, which is the, the top of cloth, you don't, if you just happen to have like better skill than another artist, you don't necessarily like lord that over somebody because that would be a humiliation that would make somebody else feel bad. That's not, that's not what producing artwork is about. It's a community activity. It's, it's to serve, right? The artists are contributing. So all of this stuff became, I don't know, you know, took that moment for it to all, for me to understand like all these years of seeing. So then I started to realize that, you know, before the commodification of art, before the, the economic stratification of the arts, you know, before, before, like whoever has the most money could afford the best artists, right? Before all of that, there was this kind of natural, more organic way, more integral way of artists producing work that can actually serve, that has a purpose that can help people, right? So that's where all of that comes from. And then while I was working with those young people in Pittsburgh, I and I also understood that that the modern artists should be able to use the community as a palette, right? So, you know, you use the, you use the world to express your ideas. If you need to, if you need to talk about, as I was saying earlier, if you need to talk about social studies, you know, Carrie and I talked a lot about this. If you need to talk about social studies, you go into the community, or you go, you go talk to judges, or you go talk to congressmen, you, if you need to talk about education, you know, you, you go to us, you use that to advance the idea or the contribution that you want to make so that the vital modern artist is going to use the world as a palette. Wow, that's a very good way to put it. I've never heard it put so eloquently in that way, but the way that you're explaining things and your philosophy on things, it's making a lot of sense for me in terms of things that I've been thinking about in my own work. Good, thanks. - Well, Hank Willis is, he's a great example of these days. - Absolutely. - Like the sort of next generation of individual who is sort of using all of these things at his disposal to make a point, whether it's politically or whether it's make a comment about something social. So, and so he's, yeah. - Yeah, I was just about to ask you if you were aware of Hank Willis Thomas's work with the Four Freedoms that he's been doing for the last few years. Okay, great. - Not certainly. - I just came from the Four Freedoms Conference in Los Angeles. - Oh, wow, okay. - Yeah, unified it. - And that's a sort of wonderful thing. - Hank, you know, if he will acknowledge like the contribution of all of these people that have come before him. - He absolutely will. - Which is really sort of wonderful. - Yes, that's very generous. - That's amazing. - I almost went to it in lineup quite with my schedule. So we probably would have saw each other there. I definitely would have recognized you. - Yeah, I squeaked in because I had just had an exhibition in Florence. - Okay. - And then, so I, you know, jump back on the plane and flew to Los Angeles and it was able to catch the tail end of it. Which was really sort of what you missed out. - Yeah, I know I missed out a lot. I saw a lot of the stuff on social media and I just wish I had to pull the trigger on it. But I'm definitely going to plan to make the next one, like 100%. And then, like, probably on the topic of community, I was gonna ask you about the Barnes Foundation, but I will hold that question for later. But a lot of your work is obviously as we've been talking and people are listening. A lot of your work is centered around community and through your investigating the methods by which the arts can be used to achieve tangible meaning in people's lives. So you wanna make a difference in people's lives to the arts. One project that comes to mind is the African-American Garden Project from 1997. It was a cultural exchange between single mothers from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and farmers from a small village in Kenya. So why was that project so important for you as an artist? - All of these things. So as I, if you look at my portfolio, right? You'll see that I'm addressing different aspects of what we need to survive as humans. - Absolutely. - So the first one was about spirituality. There was Maya Dora and her, you know, the manifestation of her spirit. The next one was about memory. My father, my father had Alzheimer's. His mind deteriorated so that there had to be a repository for his memory. The next one was about food, which had to do, you know, we all need food to survive. The next one was about housing, a home and a homeless. So each one of those projects that I've done, I was trying to illustrate how to use the community to address and to contribute to the community and how to make a use of all of those resources in order to make an artistic statement. And so, and some of them were more successful than others. And some of them were more immediately recognized. And some of them remain and have sustenance because that's what people need. - Yes. - So, you know, they, so those projects may have enjoyed a great deal more success than others because you're, or more popularity because, you know, people like to eat. So, so when I did the African and American Garden project, that, you know, what, gosh, that took like so many different iterations. And then everybody wanted a garden because, you know, everybody wants to eat. And it's such an easy thing to do, you know, which is, you go out and you dig in the dirt, you throw some stuff in it and wait for it to come out and eat it, you know, that's really kind of basic. So, and that project was, in Pittsburgh was sort of amazing at the time because, you know, certain administration was occupying, you know, positions of authority in Washington who believed that women, these, you know, people of a certain economic strata were abusing the system. You know, they were abusing their $125 a month and buy and catalogs. And, you know, buy and T-bone steaks and live in large, so they cut their food stamp allocation. And that really, the reality of the situation was that, you know, rather than really crippling, you know, the reality of the situation was that they basically crippled these individuals to the point where, you know, people living on a subsistence allowance from the United States governor, basically had their food stamps cut, their food allocations cut drastically, to the point where they couldn't feed their families and they took to the streets to, you know, try to figure out ways that they could feed their families. And I found a group of women that were working in Pittsburgh digging holes in a vacant lot and buying seed packets at a local drug store and throwing these seeds in the hole and waiting for something to come out. Basically, they didn't have very much knowledge about how to grow a garden. But, you know, I worked with the city and I worked with, like, local, again, you know, I worked with the city. I had the libraries I worked with other institutions that knew about and had resources. You know, I went to the mayor, I got the lot. I went to the mayor, I said, can we clean this out? They said, yes, we put up a fence, we cleaned it out. I went to another local organization that, you know, that had beautiful rich soil. We dumped, you know, yards and yards of, like, good, fresh mulch into this vacant lot. I brought people from an agricultural society from Kenya over to the United States to show these women how to work with the resources that they had. Then I took the women over to Kenya over to Africa to show them basically how it is to really not have anything to basically all you have is dirt. And you can make, like, a wonderful life if you know how to use what you're endowed with properly. So, yeah, so that was this kind of exchange that happened over a number of years. And I, the garden, I, that, one of the one, two, three, four, one of the four gardens that we established in Pittsburgh, I know it still was still going a year or so ago. - Wow. - When I talked to them. - Okay. - Yeah. - Wow. And so I know that, I know you mentioned earlier that, you know, as a result of that particular project, you ended up working on a series of urban, sustenance gardens as a component in other communities in other projects. One being the Queen's Commission. Can you talk about that one? - Yeah, the one at, the one, oh gosh, it was right. It was in, it was in the shadow of the unosphere. They're at the Queen's Museum in fleshing meadows. So, yeah, that one, you know, again, we took people that lived in the community who were able to, you know, the park, you know, they gave us this, you know, this beautiful section of land that we cultivated for a season. And we were, those community members were able to take, down the garden path, I think, was the catalog. We were able to take that, the proceeds from that endeavor and send it back to Mexico to help out families that were there. - Wow. So, what, how does it make you feel as an individual, 'cause I know you're speaking from a standpoint of, you mentioned earlier, being of service, but what does it mean when those type of things, like being able to send that back to Mexico? Like, when you see those things as an artist and you've had a hand in these things to these collaborations that just continue on, what do you think about those things? - 'Cause you can look at it from a standpoint of, like, you know, I'm still not satisfied. So as an artist, I'm gonna keep moving forward. Or, you see what I'm saying over, get one more. - It's like, it's more like that, because these projects have everything to do with removing, extracting the ego. So, in order to collaborate, you've really gotta kind of suppress your ego. You've gotta just take that out of the equation, because the work is not about you, it's about something else, right? It's about, it could be about education. You know, we did this, we did this, we'd gardened at the Wilmont Frazier Elementary School, with Harry Neuze and, you know, that was about keeping that school open and getting those children fed, because, you know, their lunch program had been defunded or some crazy thing, and their test scores were going down. And it was that the kids were hungry. You know, so we got that garden going, the kids started eating at school stayed open for another three years. So, in that case, it was, you know, they came out and they, you know, they did their lessons in the garden, you know, they measured, and they wrote poetry, and they did illustrations, and, you know, they worked with other, like, local organizations. So, you know, it's, you know, But it's not so much about me. I'm trying to help people understand that, you know, if we can make ourself, do your own work. Go into your studio, do, you know, be a self-indulgent surround, you know, drinkin' cappuccino, do whatever you want. However, understand that we can also have that kind of profound impact on other people that live around us. We can also continue to contribute to the world in a constructive way, in a way that can help people, in a way that other people can understand, in a way that's accessible to other individuals. You know, we can, because we can speak in a number of different languages, visually, tangibly, we can bring all of those different kinds of solutions to our lives, into other people's lives, as we continue to include people in our process. We can contribute, we can continue to enhance all of our existence as individuals, as we look out, and as we include, as we continue to help and to contribute. - Thank you so much for making that point. I really appreciate that. It's gonna be useful for a lot of people to hear that, for sure. And you mentioned earlier when I first asked you about the African-American Garden Project, as you started to answer that question, you sort of went through some of these installations that you've done over the years. That's another interesting thing that I've, or a process and method that you utilize in your practice that I found very, very interesting and also inspiring, what is it about the installation that allows you to connect with the viewer in a particular way that you can't with the photograph? - So I'm a photographer, and, or, you know, that's one of the things that I do too. So I'm bound to work with reality, right? I mean, I can make junk up, I can, you know, of course, I can, you know, fabricate photographs and that kind of thing. - But as a traditionalist, you know, I haven't learned how to do photography, you know, in a very traditional way. I basically am bound to work with what I see in front of me. So through that, you know, through working with what I have and what I see, you know, I would, I started to, I wanted there to be a way that people could, could also relate to a tangible reality. So the first installation I did, I was really, I was really interested in people being able to respond to the work I wanted, whenever people saw that, I wanted everybody to be able to get something out of it, right, and, and while they were there in it, I wanted them to be, I wanted it to assault all of their senses. I wanted them to see stuff, hear stuff, and smell stuff, be able to touch stuff. I wanted people to be able to go in and, you know, just have a total immersion into what I was, into the significance of family, right? - Yes. - Such as this was about Amdora. You know, and I'd go to, you know, like I said, then all these museums around the world, and I had seen, you know, Napoleon's shoes and, you know, the queens, slippers, and all that. And I thought, you know, if they can take that stuff and put it into a museum, then I'm gonna take Amdora's floss water in her chair, and, you know, she liked to listen to Louis Armstrong. I'm gonna put that on the radio. I'm gonna put all that in the museum, right? So it wouldn't be, because not everybody has Napoleon, it's an uncle, right? Not everybody is related to, you know, so it becomes so totally objectifying. But then, but everybody has an aunt. Everybody has like an uncle or a mom. Everybody comes from somewhere. So everybody is gonna be able to look at this work, and it will resonate with them on some level. And that's the thing that I was going for, whenever I did the first installation. So, and then that led to. - And then that's another stuff. - Was that that installation you're just referring to, was that the one titled Living in a Spirit House? - Yeah. - Okay. And then you go on to my father's table, farm stand. Another one I found really, really interesting was this idea of a triptych installation, acknowledgement, enlightenment, and memorialization. I was reading the details of each one, each little blurb of, for installation, can you talk about those? - That was Mary Jane Jacob, invited me to be a part of Spiletto that year in 2003, she was. And introduced me to another guy named Tamello Musaka, who had done this show. He did this thing in, I think it was in Google at the, or Kalisha, in Cape Town, South Africa. And where they took all these shipping containers and did like photo exhibitions, and this was way, you know, back in the early '90s. And so I was, she put us together. And here we are in Charleston, South Carolina, running around trying to figure out, you know, what to do. And, you know, meeting, like I said, this guy, Harry Neuzette, who I think he had, at that time, been working with the Williams sisters, using and making soil. And, you know, to grow food for cancer patients. And that, you know, was sort, his grandfather cultivated something called the Neuzette Rose. And if you're like, you know, if you know about roses, then you'd know what that is. So he knew what he was doing. And they sort of kept trying to push me, not to mellow, but, you know, other people that were in this biletto organization. We're trying to, they wanted me to go to these plantations and do work that was site-specific to the plantation. And this, you know, and they were showing, they showed me all these, you know, they're really very patient. And did all this wonderful and amazing stuff. As far as trying to help me facilitate my work, that would, you know, that would be activated by the community, which is what that particular spiletto was about that year, in the visual arts. And I wound up, you know, finding something that was way more profound than any piece of art could characterize or symbolize metaphorically. So, for example, I believe it was at the Middleton Plantation whenever I went there. I was, you know, I had a car I was driving around. And I wanted to go to where the people were buried. And that was directed to this sort of overgrown, sugar-bramble-filled field, where I could see indentations in the ground. And so I understood that the hundreds of indentations that I was walking over were grave sites, were sort of burial grounds. And the only acknowledgement of that graveyard where all those slaves were buried was one single headstone of the last slave that had died. And that was, you know, they're like in the '40s, '50s or something. So I collaborated with another friend of mine, Fadius Mosley, with these beautiful sculptures, and wound up, you know, making these sculptures. He drove them from Pennsylvania down to South Carolina. We put them, we erected them in this graveyard, you know, ceremoniously. At the time, I got the descendant of that last slave and the descendant of the plantation owner to meet. I got Jim Wiley, who was a writer, to write poetry, to come down from Cooper Union. I got another woman who was, so here we are out in this field, right? They brought a busload of people, they, you know, they were all gathered around this place. Then it starts to drizzle. So now it's drizzling rain, and this woman is off in the back in a white dress, walking through the woods, sinning a hymn. Jim Wiley is reading his poem. These two men are, you know, these two descendant to their shaken hands. And I was happy that I was able to give these artists an opportunity for something to do and that we could acknowledge the past in that way that we did. The other piece where I went into the Akin Ruret, it was another kind of urban plantation. You know, they, again, you know, they wanted me to do a piece about slaves, which I thought was sort of presumptuous. 'Cause I immediately found out that the slaves didn't necessarily want me to do anything about that. So, you know, so I did a piece about the house. You know, we erected these, I had, you know, these huge, these beautiful red velvet. What I did is I wanted to recreate that sort of antebellum lifestyle or a piece of it. So I made these beautiful red velvet drapes and drape them, these 14 foot drapes and draped them across the window that the slaves would have had to have looked through. To look into the ballroom, to see the landholders eating and enjoying everything that the slaves had built. I went to Ghana, and I photographed individuals who would have descended from the relatives of these individuals that lived at Akin Red, and I projected them on the wall. As a reminder for people that that place came from somewhere that didn't just pop into existence, that this was built on the backs of these individuals. I did that at Akin Red, and that caused quite a stir. I had to take it down after two days. I went up the street to the Wilmont Frazier Elementary School, and I took all of that fabric down, and I gave it to a local quilting club, and they worked with the kids from the Elementary School who were busy building their garden. And they made quilts about what they wanted to do, whenever they pointed away toward the future, what they wanted to do when they grew up. So that was that, that was that trip. Wow, I really enjoyed you breaking it down. It was amazing, because I'm looking at the photographs on your profile page for the School of Visual Arts at Penn State. So just kind of, yeah, as you're explaining them, so that's amazing. And one question before we talk about Deborah Willis, Karen May Weems, and Daddy is Mosley. We'll talk about them next, but before that, I got to ask you this question. Another interesting thing I read about you was serving as an instructor of special projects, and/or historian of the original Barnes Foundation that was in Marin, Pennsylvania. Given the history and the significance of the Barnes Foundation, the documentary, all the kind of stuff. What did that position mean to you at that time, and what sort of outlook on things looking back? I, so Kimberly Camp is an authority, like I said, in the 80s. And we remain friends, and when she took that position, at the Barnes Foundation as the president, was in, you know, that place was in kind of an arrested state of decay. And she was, you know, had basically raised, I don't know, $6 million to stabilize the collection and the building and everything else. And for people that don't know, this was, it was started by Dr. Barnes in the 20s. It is the largest, and is recognized globally as the largest collection of impressionist art outside of Europe. So there, you know, in Marion, Pennsylvania, there were like Florida ceiling, literally, just, you know, impressionist works and all kinds of artwork from, you know, from the 1920s and 30s. You can imagine the enormous, you know, the value of this collection. So there had, as you mentioned, the movie, the art of the steel, I guess, there was, there was, you know, intentions, everybody had this, not everybody, but there was a great number of people that had every intention of moving the collection from where it was in Marion, Pennsylvania, into Philadelphia. They eventually succeeded. So, you know, what a lot of people don't know is that Kimberly had gone to these individuals who enabled the collection to be moved prior to the movement of the thing to try, because it was Dr. Barnes's will to keep the collection where it was after his death. But she had gone to these people, you know, to ask him for money, basically, and they were saying, well, no, let's move it. And they were saying Kimberly said, well, if you've got the money to move it, why don't you have the money to keep it where it is. And they said, well, that's not something that we're interested in. So, you know, try to figure out all kinds of different ways to maintain the building and the exhibition, or not the exhibition, but the collection where it was, but it didn't, it never worked out that way. Of all of this, she hired me as an oral historian to go around the United States and talk to people who had known Dr. Barnes and had benefited from his health care program and from his educate because the Barnes Foundation is a school. All these people are benefiting from his educational program. They were benefiting from the Arboratum from the Horticultural program. So this was not, this wasn't a museum. This was an educational experience for the community that and Dr. Barnes was not shy about reaching out into the African American community. Whenever he would conduct classes in the Barnes Foundation, he would put, let's name an artist. Let's put a Picasso or a Matisse or a Medigliani on this little black, this black drape with black velvet, put it on a cart and wheel this thing out. And the foreman, the janitor, the manager, the boss would all sit around together eating their lunch, looking at these works of art and everybody had something to say in the 1920s to have a black people mixing with people from other economics strata like that in the 20s is unheard of. So to see his kind of real for him to be helping people with their housing, I'm talking about building houses for people, making, you know, making his home. This guy is like made his money because he created like an antibiotic before there were antibiotics in medicine. So he was a multi multi millionaire to make his home accessible to young black women for Mrs Barnes to sit down and talk about shoes and shopping and heritage and African sculpture with young African Americans with young black people who they would invite into their home on a regular basis was unheard of. You know so that on along the main line of Philadelphia this you know he was a pariah and he spoke his mind he was very outspoken so for me to learn all of that stuff through these oral histories that I was collecting was for me it completely enlighten. So for me to can then to become an instructor what I was doing is I basically I based my teaching on John because he worked with John Dewey who was you know he was ahead of his time as an educationalist. So for and it was about seeing it was about how you learn by seeing so that's what that's what I based my lessons on you know these young people would come into the barns. So we would walk around and I'd have them write papers and then give presentations on how what they saw related to not only their own lives but to other things in the foundation that they had seen how these you know because that's the way that Barnes had the place arranged. So you can access this stuff online and you can see that you know it's all hunts the lawn style which was very popular at the turn of the last century you know as opposed to the rectilinear the way that it is now you know it's sort of the way that they do things now with this you know one picture hanging right next to it's another kind of stratification it's like you know this each work is you know so the hung you know way that you know makes it more precious. So yeah that's what I learned from working at the Barnes Foundation and it impacted my life in a way that I was able to understand that there can be access and you know people can use what exists in the arts in a way as a vehicle to get someplace else so yeah. It's amazing thank you so much for sharing that and the next question after you Lonnie is you not only is obvious now that you not only collaborate with various communities around the world as a means to produce your own work but to collaborate with other artists scholars curators to make specific things happen. And I'll list a few things off whether that those things are framing the diaspora with Dr. Deborah Willis or designing an exhibition catalog for the kitchen table series with Kierman Wienes that was at Holland's University and or producing a book about sculpture co-producing call authoring a book about that he is mostly the sculpture what is it about community and connection with others for a common goal that you embrace. You seem to embrace so well to get things done thank you. I just you know I'm just trying to I'm just trying to do a good job and I've had the great the great honor and the great fortune of being selected by those individuals that you just mentioned to work on these projects with them. You know most well I think that beyond the kitchen tales that that catalog I think that I think the piece that Carrie and I did together Lonnie Lincoln in me maybe it's Lincoln Lonnie in me it's a hologram that that she did which is actually kind of cool. That was that I think was more of collaboration. And the most recent, I should say, the most recent collaboration. That was that look three festival, right? Yeah, okay. And it continues to circulate. It's around. And Dr. Willis, you know, and her profound generosity, you know, continues to include me in exhibitions and catalogs. So, and David Lewis, you know, came into my office one day and asked if I wanted to be the photographer to do the book about that he was authoring on Thad Mosul. So, it's just been whenever you, whenever you have these kinds of experiences with these kinds of artists, with any artist, whenever anybody feels as if this is why I think this, this kind of stuff is so important. Imagine having someone call you on the phone or encounter you at one place or another and say, you know, I was just thinking about you and I think there's something that I'd like to talk to you about. I'm trying to figure out how to resolve a certain part of a problem that I have. Can you, can you, do you want to talk about that? Can you help me? Imagine, you know, just being able to help someone solve a problem, which is what it comes down to. In my case, I've been, you know, fortunate enough that some of the people that have asked me to help them solve problems or to participate, you know, have been those individuals that you mentioned, you know, but there's so many other people that I've had the great honor of being able to work with in one way or another in a number of different capacities. So, there's, that's what it is, you know, that's, it's that more than just a project or another. It's, it's simple human interaction that has more value than, you know, the work, the piece, the art, the book, the installation, whatever, is a by project, a by product. The project itself is simply a by product of that, the most essential part, which is the human interaction, the exchange of ideas, touching, touching another individual, helping someone else solve a problem. That's, that's the important thing. That's the value. That's an amazing way to put it. And, um, with that being said, do you have anything a particular moment, a significant memory of working with a idea of those individuals that you'd like to share that, that was, that you'd like to hold on to? Everything, you know, there's not, there can't be one. As many. Because, because there's so many and it's, you know, they all have value for so many different reasons. Like I said, I feel like if nothing, if nothing else happens, if I was able to help somebody, if I was able to contribute to, to somebody's idea or to somebody's project, or help them come to some kind of resolution, then I guess I'm alright. Yeah, that's amazing, Lonnie. Thank you so much for sharing that. That was amazing. I want to actual about your project, a conversation with the world, but I kind of want to set this question up in a particular way. I did the light work residency back in August of 2018. And when I was there, through doing my own work, I began to do specific research that's still ongoing about, uh, Rorde Carava, DiWold Bay and Kirit May Wings. But one of the, one of the things that I found myself doing there was digging through the archives. And you know, as you know, Mary Lee, she's such a nice person. So generous. She's pretty amazing. And I'm, so I'm sitting here, I'm, I got contact sheet number 124, which is embracing Eatonville. Oh, yeah. And I was reading through that and I realized, Mary Lee said, is she framed and mad at the whole show for that? So she, yeah, so that was pretty amazing to find out. And she also sent me in the mail issue one, contact sheet 128, which is you, Lonnie Graham, a conversation with the world. And so again, I'm going to go to this next book that I have that's from Dad's Press, which was published in 2017. So out of all the things that we've been talking about, community, collaboration, all these different things, a conversation with the world. This seems to really put all the things that you've been speaking about in one place in a very particular way. It's not everything, but I think it's a good accumulation of things that you've done because you've traveled around the world to make this work. I mean, you've been to places like Africa, Asia, India, Iceland, Nepal, Tibet, Papua New Guinea. You've done different things in these places. Now for me, on the outside looking in, as an artist producing this work, it seems to be all-encompassing. What I mean by that is it puts forth your perspective as a human on the world, which is a very big thing to share with others. What do you think about that? What does a conversation with the world mean to you? Why did you make this work? Well, I believe the significance of the project is, it functions, as you might know, as a kind of a template. I ask these same eight questions to anybody that I encounter in any one of the, I don't know, 48 or 50 countries that I've had the privilege of visiting. The stunning part of it is the great revelation, whether it's a revelation or not, it was to me, is that people generally answer the questions in pretty much the same way. There's one or two questions that almost everybody that I ask, like 85 or 90% of the people that I ask, answer in the same way. So, to dispel any mystery that listeners may have, is I'm asking questions, I'm not asking what your favorite color you've read as spiders. What I'm asking is about your background, I'm asking about your ancestors, I'm asking what spiritual construct do you adhere to? I'm asking about the contributions of your ancestors to your current lifestyle. One opinion question I ask is about people's opinion of Western culture. So, these are whenever, I abandoned the project early on. I started just thinking, oh, well, I'd like to talk to people, I'd like to take pictures. So, maybe I'll talk to people and then take a picture and that'll be that. So, I did that for a while and it was really stupid because everybody was answering the same questions the same way and I'm going, this is dumb. And I said, this is, you know, I'm not going to do this. But then, after thinking about it for a year, in like 1989 or something, I started thinking, how is it that all these, how is it that I can be in Mexico? And, you know, this guy that lives in like this little Dobie House can answer the same way as the imam in jane is answering. And the same way that this woman in Kyoto, wait a minute, you know, this is, this is weird. Let me, let me go do this some more. So, I go back. So, I commenced again in like 1981, 1991, 1992. And, and I thought, this is, this is kind of crazy. All these people are answering the same questions in the same way. This is like a template. These answers are like, these questions are like a template. I can just continue to do this. And I did. And it basically it serves as a, a measure of our, of our commonality, of our common humanity. It, you know, it shows that we've all got a family. We've all got moms and dads. We all have a beginning in an end. We all want to know like answers to the great unknown, you know, we're all people. And if we're all people, if we all have so much in common, then what's the problem? That's a big question. And I'm not a polaroid film. So, I can't do anymore. Okay. So, that, that project is over. Okay. I mean, one of the things you talk about, I think is a, I read a quote from you and I, so I sort of pulled it out. It says, I am an internal optimist. I believe in the power of what pictures can do. Photography transcends language. I am friends with people on social media who do not speak English, but we can communicate through images. So, so that sort of informs, you know, the way you think and reiterate some of the ways you've been talking about community. What is it about being an internal, an internal optimist trying to answer these big questions or, or pose these big questions through our, I'm a terminal optimist. I think, I think they got there wrong. They got there. Okay. So, as a terminal optimist, I'll just, I'll continue to look on the light side. Okay. Until it kills me, I guess. But you're asking what, what is it about being optimistic? Mm-hmm. Well, you know, you can, you can buy our optimism, art, photography, and then you pull those questions through your work. So how do you, you know, it's a, it's a way that you operate, you know, it's, it's very consistent. Um, and, and, and I'm just kind of speaking to you as a younger artist, uh, nor that other younger artists are going to hear this, I think that some of the things that you're saying are, are very necessary for, for us as younger artists to think about. So, so what would you say to younger artists, uh, in relationship to those things or a relationship to the conversation with the world? Just that. I mean, just, well, no, I mean, in, in, I guess an implicit in that title is, is the word conversation or the simple act of conversing in, in, in that implied in that is this kind of reciprocity is giving and taking, is learning and listening, you know, it's not necessarily always about saying something as much as it is listening. It's not necessarily always about doing something as much as it is helping and letting someone else do or helping someone else do. So it's not always about sort of imposing yourself, but in many cases, including others in your process. So yeah, it's, it's that kind of being a little bit, you know, not too much more than what your grandmother had suggested in just being, you know, being, being polite and including people and listening to what people have to say. I couldn't ever have had a conversation with the thousands of people that I've had a conversation with, if I was talking all the time, you know, it's all about listening. That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that, Lonnie. Is there anything else you would like to share as I've reached the end of my questions, but it's been so profound to hear you speak about your work and the things you're thinking about within your practice? I appreciate the fact that you thought I was worth while talking to you. Thank you. No problem. I always take the philosophy, you know, I always tell people when I speak about my work is that I always reflect on the fact of being chestised in a good way early on in my life. And you didn't speak when older people were talking, you listened. Exactly. And so anytime I find someone doing the same thing that that I do, and especially someone who looks like me doing what I do, I want to take the time to listen. And because I know I don't know everything, I'm only 29. And there's a whole lot of people out there who have seen things I've yet to see. So that's the perspective I always try to come from. My mentor always used to tell me, boy, a still tongue makes a wise head. Oh yeah. So yeah. That's a good one. I appreciate it, Lonnie. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was my conversation with Lonnie Graham. I hope you enjoyed it. A few updates in regards to the COVID-19 situation. Rochelle, Mosmas, and Lanoes, April visit has been counseled. And also the April 29th event in collaboration with the Prior Center on Arkansas for Tire for Jelevy Grice has also been counseled. Hopefully as we move forward through the summer and into the fall, we'll be able to revisit those events and work on future dates. To keep up to date on things, follow us on Instagram and Twitter at full talks of color. Thank you for listening until next time.