ART21

mellow pensive music sparse percussive music [laughs] sparse percussive music [speaking French] quirky curious music [knocking] Oui?

Bonjour.

tender ethereal music On December 27th, 1986, my mother wrote in her diary: "My mother died today."

On March 15, 2006, in turn, I wrote in mine: "My mother died today."

No one will say this about me.

The end.

mellow piano music pensive piano music curious ethereal music pensive ethereal music [camera snapping] [Tuan VO] Vietnam is a country full of ghosts.

pensive ambient music Ghosts, to me, are unresolved memories that need to be resolved.

We are taught certain histories that... support certain agendas.

I would rather explore history through the personal lens.

[Tuan VO] People have a need to share their stories.

These stories are oftentimes forgotten stories, unheard-of stories, stories erased by the dominant narrative.

pensive ethereal music So the challenge is just to be open to what people want to say.

Are you coming in or going out?

I go out [indistinct].

-Not enough ice?

-Yeah.

[Tuan] Are you going now?

[Tuan VO] I work a lot with communities that come out of the different moments of colonial struggle in Vietnam who have experienced displacement, who have migrated across the seas.

[Tuan] Today, we are down in Buras.

We're about an hour south of New Orleans proper.

We're filming the docks and the shrimpers -- mostly Vietnamese shrimpers -- coming in.

It's a project of, for, about, and with the Vietnamese community of New Orleans.

[Tuan VO] The film is based on the weaving of stories that we were told, but it's also part fiction.

Can she wear your boots?

Dig your feet in.

Action!

Hands down, relaxed.

And cut!

[Tuan VO] I like filmmaking because it is inherently a very collaborative process.

[Tuan] Let's get into position one.

All right, Tommy.

You're here.

You're distressed.

You're trying to find your father.

You're looking out, and you're trying to find the boat.

Just say your first line after you open the door.

Yeah.

-"Have you seen my dad?"

-Have you seen my dad?

[Tuan] Action!

[Tuan VO] Collaboration requires constant negotiating, in the most constructive way.

We're figuring out together, like, the best ways to tell the story or the best stories to tell.

Have you seen my dad?

Wha-- who the hell is this?

What's... Trenton!

T-- Tommy.

People know me as Tommy.

Oh, you're Tom's kid!

Yeah.

No, actually, I don't know, son, he should be out there.

Why don't you-- here, let me... call him and see which... Hey, call Tom.

We can see which pier he's parked at.

Hey!

Tom, yeah, where ya at?

Well, yeah, it-- it was a good catch... [Tuan VO] I do all of my editing myself.

People look at a painting for, like, five seconds.

Video art is even more challenging.

So, I have to be able to captivate them and draw them in, and then take 'em on a journey.

[chuckles] It's also a space of memory.

I can... rewind and... relive and rewind and relive and rewind and relive.

pensive ambient music A lot of people leave, and they tell me they always feel like they're missing out on something no matter where they turn.

It gives you a very kind of... you know, hallucinogenic kind of feeling, similar to how the space of memory operates.

[Tuan VO] In my work, there's always people moving from one place to another, or people who have moved from place to place.

And I think that's a condition of, you know, me always growing up thinking about place.

I was born in Vietnam, and, at a young age, my family and I escaped by boat, went through... a refugee camp in Malaysia.

We landed in the US.

When my family and I escaped, they put the important documents into a plastic bag and some photos.

But, because we had to swim to the boat and because we had to swim from the boat to shore, the photos got destroyed.

So, I didn't have any photos of myself as a child.

This is photos from my grandmother's collection that I found last year.

I didn't know this, but my mom sent her photos of us when we were in Oklahoma and Texas.

That's my dad, that's my mom, that's me, my little brother.

tender ethereal music [Tuan VO] I moved back to Vietnam 20 years ago.

In a very kind of subconscious way, I wanted to return to Vietnam to liberate myself from this idea of home that I could never grasp while I was growing up in the US.

Now, I think there is no home.

I don't think that being in between worlds is something that limits us.

That liminality actually empowers people.

I think learning to understand different worlds is going to be a skill that helps us to navigate a very precarious future.

[gong strike] [gong hum continues] [metallic strike] [another metallic strike] So these are shells that we found in our research.

They're 57-millimeter shells used during the American War in Vietnam.

And we found that they had a really beautiful resonance.

[metallic clanging] We've tuned them by thinning them out, and getting 'em to the right frequency that promote healing.

And then, we'll make these mobile elements out of the same material, essentially turning objects and material that were meant to destroy and kill and maim to healing objects.

ethereal ambient music [Tuan VO] I make sculpture and moving image.

I'm exploring the relationship between the two -- between the intangible and the tangible.

On a regular film set, the objects are always, like, these props that support a narrative.

The objects that I make, I consider them... actors.

They're agents in the story; they're protagonists.

[grinding] In Hanoi, there's a structure known as the Moroccan Gate that was built by Moroccan soldiers as a... form of solidarity with the Vietnamese.

In the film, the protagonist tries to get in contact with her father, who was a Moroccan soldier, through a letter that she wrote.

Her father had died when she was a very young child.

She takes it to the gate, and the gate becomes this portal, in which she sends the letter.

otherwordly ambient music [Tuan VO] With the team that built out the CGI, we were able to imagine the gate through time as we were moving into the future.

The future space is that imaginative space -- the space that we can carve out to allow for possibilities.

tender ethereal music I think artworks are most effective when they can destabilize a person's point of view.

I don't want people to leave thinking they know the answer to something.

I want people to leave... moved by what they've seen, but also questioning what they've seen and everything else.

[Tuan] Come here, I'm gonna show you something.

-See those things on the pier?

-[boy] Yeah.

[Tuan] Those are birds.

We only have one take.

Once you get there, all the birds will start flying.

It'll be the most beautiful thing in the world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Action, camera!

[cheering] That was the one.

It's like the perfect shot.

It is, man, with the sun peeking behind the pillars on the left.

[Tuan VO] You know, it's through storytelling that we decipher and understand the world around us.

This constant navigating of what stories can be told and what stories cannot be told is what my practice is embodying.

[Dyani VO] People tend to classify me first and foremost as a painter, and I am -- you know, I love painting.

But the foundation of my painting actually lives within my relationship to our greater visual culture.

And a lot of that, for me, the entry point was through bead work.

curious sparse music I draw really strongly from the histories of abstract Lakota artistic practices and easel painting abstraction.

Abstraction is pairing down extremely complex thoughts and ideas into the most poignant artistic gestures possible.

[Dyani] It's really wild to look at this 'cause it's just, you know, such bold geometry across... a rectangle, but then it ends up being extremely detailed, even though from the, you know, basis of the geometry of that sketch, it looks... deceivingly simple.

The composition of Wopila I, II, and III, they're all these mirrored hourglass forms, which, in Lakota, are called "kapemni."

At its core, those symbols speak to ideas of balance, of our relationship between earth and sky, our relationship between here and the spiritual realm.

Some of the symbolism that is in any of my works, I have figured out ways that I'm comfortable speaking to it that is paired down to core concepts -- things that help us remember how we want to walk through the world, how we want to be with one another.

But I have a... justified fear... of giving it all away because of the history of how people in this country have treated our communities.

And so there's certain elements that just aren't for sale.

Being somebody who's mixed, my lived situations have been an amalgamation of influences.

My time and experience snowboarding and skateboarding and growing up in, like, hip-hop culture and rave culture, that's an informative part of my lived experience as well, as is my experience as a Lakota person.

I went to tribal colleges, and I have an MFA.

There's all of these different parts of me that inform why I'm making what I'm making.

[Darienne] Maybe let's start at the end there, since these are some of our oldest items.

These moccasins are from the early 19th century, quillwork still intact.

And something really special about them is they have a parfleche on their sole!

The quillwork on these ones is really beautiful.

Dare, are you okay if I take this out?

-Yeah, just be gentle.

-Yep.

Tell me about these little beads where it's interrupting the pattern.

[Dyani] A lot of times, people will call it "the spirit bead."

The teaching is generally that life isn't perfect, so people will often let that happen or put them in on purpose.

You look at the rest of this, I mean, it's absolutely perfect.

There's no way that they were like...

-"Whoops!"

-"Oh!"

[laughs] "Totally missed that random blue bead."

[Darienne] So we have this one and then a couple more.

[Dyani] Oh, oh, beautiful!

I love the green yarn.

[Dyani] In Lakota artistic practices, people have been practicing abstraction in the form of paint on raw hide in the form of bead work, in the form of porcupine quillwork, and other applications for millennia.

We don't know exactly how each object was collected, but we do know that it's a really sordid history.

And we do know that people were not collecting the maker's name, and, oftentime, even the tribe.

So, we're faced with this chasm of... not knowing.

pensive ambient music [Dyani VO] Native art has historically been othered.

It is "craft," or "design," or "self-taught," or "ethnographic," or "anthropological" -- anything outside of "This is just art."

And up until very recently, within the systems of academia, we have been taught European and European-American art history.

We've made progress, but that progress is in its infancy.

[phone camera snaps] -[laughter] -[Dyani] Ooh!

-[woman] Hi!

-[Dyani] Hi!

-How ya doing?

-[woman] Good!

-[Dyani] Is this your work?

-[woman] Yeah.

-Wow, beautiful.

-Thank you.

-Really good work!

-Thank you.

That's gorgeous.

I haven't exhibited here since 2013, but Santa Fe Indian Art Market is still home in so many ways.

soft curious music As Native people, we've had to build our own field, and this is a representation of that.

[Dyani] [indistinct]!

Oh, my word!

[Dyani VO] I approach my work as this concentric circles of people that I'm trying to reach.

And first and foremost, I'm usually trying to speak to Lakota people and Native people, because we haven't had the privilege to see our communities represented in the fine arts world in the way that so many other people have.

And... I want the work to be seen and enjoyed by all people that encounter it, period.

It's not two worlds.

We may have multiple cultural influences, but we all are sharing one common world, and hopefully, we're making efforts to learn how to collectively do that better.

[rummaging] There we go.

Okay.

A dark blue and its partner, the light blue; a dark red, and its partner, the light red; and a dark gold, and its partner, -the light gold.

-[woman] Okay.

[whispering] It'll be pretty.

[laughs] [Dyani VO] It took a lot of planning in advance before we even got to actually stitching beads.

The beginning of the process is, you know, figuring out the composition, and then once I've figured out the composition, then it comes down to figuring out the math.

[Dyani] Here we go: Whitney, nine-millimeter bugles planning, at eight feet by 14 feet, which is 96 inches by 168 inches, 15,000 nine-millimeter bugles per kilogram.

I need approximately 677,376 beads total.

exciting pensive music [Dyani VO] Each strip is beaded.

Once the bead work is complete, I paint the panel systems, and then piece the entire panel system together, and then we create a kind of mock bridge that I crawl around on to lay out all the geometry so that I know exactly where each strip is supposed to be placed.

ethereal ambient music A lot of what I've been thinking about lately is: how do you protect the sanctity of your studio practice and the time needed and necessary to be able to sit back and reflect on your practice?

What we desire as artists, what we wanna do, what brings us back to the studio day after day after day doesn't always match... what the market desires from us.

And... as an Indigenous person, you have an extra layer of... commitment to community as well.

Even if you're working full-time as an artist, the epic battle is how to actually have time in your studio to make the art.

I had known for quite some time that I would eventually need help, but I was really resistant because, up until that point, it was entirely all my hands.

Once I realized that, you know, we have systems within our communities that already support in artistic production, I thought to myself, "Well, I could model support within my studio more closely aligned to how we do this within my community, as opposed to, like, how the art world has historically done this."

My daughter works here, my mother-in-law works here, my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my niece, their cousin, they are all family, community, and friends.

[Dyani] So, these guys, I basically ask them to kind of, like, bead by number, like you would paint by number -- you know, you put the fives where the fives go, you put the fours where the fours go -- and that's what they've done with me for... two years.

This piece, I wanted to do something akin to a crazy quilt: just kind of, like, open it up for them to be able to go into the bead stash, pick the colors they wanna work with, and make strips within a certain measurement, so that I can then later take the information and create this sculptural piece.

[Dyani] This is my daughter's work, this is my daughter's work, I think this is hers too.

This is a whole lot of Nina going on right here.

This is her work.

This is my mother-in-law, Helen's, work.

This is my mother-in-law's work.

This is, too.

[Dyani VO] These last few years have felt like an outpouring of support in a way that I feel really humbled by, really, really deeply grateful for.

I feel like any time one of us gets an opportunity, it's a blessing for the field, it's a blessing for our communities -- both intimate communities and larger communities.

tender orchestral music I really hope that my work helps shift this perspective on how we understand the history of American art.

Our artistic practices are reflections of our existences.

Our artistic practices are reflections of our society.

And if we're only speaking to that history from a singular perspective, we are leaving out so much of the story.

And if we talk about the ways that we have influenced one another, that we have supported one another, that we have learned from one another, the ways that we have harmed one another, then we can learn how to do better next time.

[Lubaina VO] I've lived 30-odd years here in Preston, in the north of England.

Many of the protagonists in my paintings are people in the situations I've found myself in: on a bus, in a shop, just people doing what people do.

soft pensive music They're either making something, or they're talking about something, or they're moving objects 'round a table.

There's something familiar about the situation -- perhaps about the gesture or about the clothing or about the color or about the pattern.

And, in that kind of familiarity, I want people to... connect.

With "The Street Sellers," I wanted the visitors to feel as if they were outside, in a market, engaging with a street seller as another human being.

[Lubaina] The front of this sign is in phonetics, and the point of it is that you... hopefully try to read it.

So, the sign says "exotic breakfast," but on the back is... a kind of hint at the relationship that he has, both with the birds that he's taken the eggs from and the beauty of the eggs themselves.

And he says, "gentle shells."

[Lubaina VO] You see that there is a political gap in which you can situate yourself, and, sometimes, an actual space in the canvas.

So, there might be a table and people sitting at a table, but there's room for you, the audience member, at that table, and that's telling you something.

You read the painting as you want to read in it, but I'm always trying to offer clues.

When I'm painting on objects, I'm trying even more to say, "We're all part of this conversation, and you can tell because I've made this pattern or this portrait or this scene on something that I know you know."

At the heart of everything, I'm trying to bypass the gatekeepers of history or the gatekeepers of contemporary museums and say, "Let's have a conversation in this space about... your life, my life, and our histories, and where we belong."

[man on radio] Welcome everyone to [indistinct].

Match just underway.

Liverpool kicking off, and [indistinct]... actually turned the kickoff all the way back to [indistinct], who's returned to the Liverpool team.

He looks exceedingly clean-shaven, I must say, on his return after his hamstring problems... [Lubaina VO] Often, while I'm working, I'm listening to something -- from music to... English football matches... to biographies -- because what I'm doing is quite difficult, so I need to be distracted by something that thinks of itself as equally important.

Lots of the drawings in this room are just made to be drawing something that's sort of for nothing, as opposed to be... drawing for something that's actually going to be made.

I don't worry if the shape's not right or the line's not right, I just sort of keep going.

So, I find it quite relaxing to do, and sometimes, these things turn into something else.

Although I trained as a theater designer, I don't get excited about making objects, I get excited about transforming objects.

[Lubaina] I really like that.

Hmm.

Well, let me have a look over there.

-[man] These are more... -[Lubaina] Yeah.

[man] These is quite interesting.

[Lubaina] Oh my goodness!

Yeah, sort of like the cupboard doors of some pantry thing.

Maybe like an alcove.

[Lubaina] Oh my goodness.

[man] That's quite interesting.

It's like a... [Lubaina, whispering] Oh, my word!

I like the look of them.

[Lubaina VO] I learned about looking and about being an artist from my mother, really.

Every weekend, my mother would take me either to a museum, or an art gallery, or different department stores, which I realized was exactly the same as a museum.

tender pensive music You can wander for hours on end, you can look at beautiful things.

Objects in a sense have always had a life of their own.

And I learned that 65, 70 years ago.

[Lubaina in video] It really is difficult for me to say, "The white art world is racist."

It's difficult to say that because... [chuckles] there's a sort of unchangeability about that.

You know?

I can't look at it like that.

I have to look at it -- the art world -- as something that can be changed.

[Lubaina VO] When I first started to put together exhibitions of other people's work, curating was not what it was.

I was an artist, and I was interested in other Black artists, what they were doing, what they were saying.

Through the British art school system, almost all of us were the only Black person in each year.

I was really interested in what the women artists would make if we were talking about the things that were particular to us.

In the 1980s, I gathered together quite a few artists and put on three exhibitions, sort of more or less one after the other.

I was gathering artwork from people I knew, like Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard.

I didn't anticipate that we would all become so well known and so successful, but it did take 40 years.

upbeat ethereal music [female reporter VO] A celebration, next, of the British artist Lubaina Himid.

[female reporter VO] Lubaina Himid is a pioneer for the Black Arts Movement.

[man] The winner of this year's Turner Prize... is Lubaina Himid!

[applause] [Lubaina VO] We got to rely on some individuals -- curators as well as art historians -- who understood there was a gap, and they were lucky enough that many, many of us never stopped working and were not... broken or dead or hidden.

Whereas I think, in the past, we all expected that we did have to just patiently wait 'til it was our turn, and I think that's what contemporary living has... has exposed: that some people don't need to wait and some people do.

Recently, I've enjoyed working with spaces and making interventions -- I suppose, if you like -- into places and spaces.

pensive orchestral music This enormous length of 400 yards of African cloth that's kind of wrapped around, knotted... in a museum that's purporting to be about the certain history of England.

I am sort of saying, "Have a conversation with me through this artwork that might be something slightly different than you'd seen in this place before."

The cloth is there to kind of shake up the gaps of that history.

It really is not so much "How will the work be seen," but "What will the work have done?"

I'm trying to disrupt, to remind, to cause tension, and to cause you to not quite be able to look as you usually could look.

I want to show a moment, if you like, between the question and the answer.

In between a question and an answer, the whole world takes place.

soft curious music [man VO] 'Art in the 21st Century' is available on Amazon Prime Video.