ART21

[man VO] The following program contains mature content which may not be suitable for all audiences.

Viewer discretion is advised.

soft uplifting music ethereal ambient music [Amy VO] I really have this deep belief that images can change the world.

It's not that I started making work with that belief, but it's what I've come to know.

It's a beautiful way to tell a story.

I consider myself an American Realist.

For me, it means just recognizing my Americanness first, and just wanting the work to join a greater ongoing conversation.

Edward Hopper or Andy Wyeth, they're telling these American stories, and I'm also telling American stories.

[male announcer VO] Miss Amy Sherald, portrait artist.

[woman VO] Last week, Amy Sherald went from being a virtual unknown to one of the most talked-about artists in the world.

On Monday, her painting of Michelle Obama was unveiled alongside Kehinde Wiley's portrait of President Barack Obama.

Both Sherald and Wiley were interviewed and chosen for the job by the Obamas themselves...

I wanted to paint a quiet and powerful portrait of her that offered the viewer a different kind of moment.

sensitive piano music And make it truly about her and not about the "First Lady" title.

And making everyone feel the way that she makes people feel in person, which is like she's very relatable.

When they look at Michelle, they can see themselves.

By being herself, she gives us permission to be our full selves.

It just so happens that painting Black people is kind of political.

But these figures hanging on museum walls, it's more than just that; you know, it's more than just the corrective narrative.

It's gotta be about humanity first, and then everything else has to follow.

The decision to paint the skin in gray, when I first started making this work, I think I had an anxiety about the work being marginalized and the conversation solely being about identity.

This was something that I wasn't trying to escape necessarily, but I wanted the work to be bigger than that.

I started to think of it as a way to allow the viewer to have an experience that was not about race first.

These paintings, for me, are really about our interior lives.

[birds chirping] [sprinkler ticking] Well, this is Amy.

It's not a large one, but that's Amy, and I'm trying to think of her age at the time.

[Amy] Six or seven, maybe second grade.

And then this is all of my siblings.

[Geraldine] Yeah, Amy was the bossy one.

[laughter] [Amy] That's funny.

She wanted to be an artist and, of course, I would always say, "I don't want a starving artist.

You can be a doctor, a lawyer, anything better than an artist.

Do your art on the side."

But she was determined to be an artist.

Yeah, and this is my mom when she was 19.

[Geraldine] High school.

sensitive piano music Having these here for me was the opportunity to understand my history and where I come from.

And after using the gray scale painting, I really started to think about these images that I had growing up.

I was always drawn to the photograph of my grandmother, Jewel.

I just think photographs from this time, the eyes really tell a story, like you can really feel who they were in that moment, and I think that's what really draws me to black and white photography is because it's so special and saturated with so much emotional energy.

Looking at her picture, I saw a woman who was dignified, who represented herself in a way that influenced how I wanted to be represented in the world as well.

I don't think I realized that I was missing seeing imagery of myself in art history.

It wasn't until I came across a painting that actually had a person of color in it -- a Black person -- that I realized that I had never seen that before.

As a sixth grader, my first time going to a museum, when I saw this painting by Bo Bartlett, I was shocked that I was looking at a figure of a Black man.

He was standing in front of a house, he had on a belt that had, like, some handyman stuff.

I just remember standing there for a few minutes, and I realized when I saw that work that I wanted to make paintings like that.

I was able to see my future in that moment.

So this is my childhood bedroom, and it's pretty much exactly as I left it when I moved to Atlanta to go to Clark Atlanta University.

I didn't have the kind of mom that, like, let us put posters up in our room or anything like that; like, everything had to be just like this when I left to go to school.

smooth jazzy music [Amy VO] I waited tables from the time I was 25 until I was about 37.

I kept painting.

I was trying to figure out where I fit in and what my voice would be, and in my mind I was like, "Well, I don't see just paintings of Black people just being Black."

Like, we're just here, we're living our lives, hanging out, just being ourselves.

Post grad school, I run into this model who was, like, a six-one, young Black woman, and I asked her if she would come and allow me to take a picture of her.

She had on a pink shirt that had white polka dots on it and a big bow tie.

She's standing there with her arms dropped down to her side, her gaze meeting the viewer, and she looks a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit awkward.

She, in that moment, stood there as, like, everything that I wanted to represent.

She was fully herself in this out-of-the-box kind of way.

That painting was a seminal piece for me because it really solidified in my mind, like, what exactly I was doing.

I wanted to make images that told stories like this.

I started finding the models that I wanted to find, creating these different narratives and scenarios that I wanted to see exist in the world.

[Amy] Hi, guys!

Hi!

[man] How are you?

Very nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you.

-[man] Nice to meet you too.

Oh... Hi.

[man] Hi, very nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

Thank you for doing this.

You're a medium?

[man] Yep, yes.

[Amy] All right, let's head down.

I just gotta get a visual of what this is gonna look like.

I kinda... My process is that I find the painting, like... You know, we're gonna do a lot of different poses.

[man] Cool.

[Amy] Let's give it a shot and see how it goes.

[man] Like this.

And then just like that.

[Amy] Yup.

And then move this foot up just a couple of inches.

-[man] I did.

-[Amy] Oh, there we go.

[beep] Okay, Raj, look at him in his eyes.

[beep] [camera snap] curious ambient music [Amy VO] Photography is the beginning of the painting.

It's how I begin to search for what I want in the work.

I let the models feel their way through what's happening, and then each pose, I try to adjust to find exactly what I'm looking for, what the painting is going to be like.

What is it going to feel like?

Are the colors right?

Are positions right?

All right, we're shooting.

[Amy VO] I rely on the organic in my work; like, I try not to over-plan, I just go in with my antennas up, looking for the right moments and waiting for that synergy to build between the models.

And I leave the photo session with exactly the image that I'm going to work with, so it's almost like it's my sketchbook.

That's amazing.

That's good.

This is perfect 'cause the way your noses are, everything is great.

[Amy VO] I have been looking at a lot of photographs of iconic American moments and reconsidering them and reimagining them.

And so I came across the image from the V Day kiss, and then I thought, "It would be wonderful if I could recreate this image but with two men."

When I think about who's going to be represented in my work, I think it speaks to the moment.

[woman VO] This morning, the family of a Kentucky woman shot and killed by police is demanding answers, filing a wrongful death lawsuit against three officers, Breonna Taylor's family claiming officers blindly fired more than 20 shots into her apartment two months ago.

On March 13th, three officers entered... [Amy VO] Breonna Taylor was an all-American girl from an all-American family.

Her mom told me that she was a girly girl and she liked to get dressed up.

And it was really heartbreaking for me to realize that it was also a love story, that her boyfriend at the time was going to propose to her, like, within weeks of that happening, so then I wanted to include the engagement ring.

And all of these things clued me in to how I felt like she would possibly want to be represented on the cover of a magazine.

emotional music I painted it for her family so that when they look at this image, they see the whole story.

I think that we deserved a whole picture of her life.

After the cover came out, the work was co-acquired by her hometown museum, which is The Speed, but then also the Smithsonian African-American Museum of History and Culture.

I thought that it was important for it to be in line-of-sight of the government in Washington DC.

I just started having the space to make paintings this large.

It's a dream come true; it's the dream that I had when I was in high school when I realized that artists had big studios and made huge paintings.

Sometimes, it feels surreal to walk in here and just see the work that I've made and see the work that I'm making.

For most of my life, it was something that I was striving for.

uplifting ethereal music When I look back at my life, it seems fairly orchestrated, these kind of moments that push you forward.

I just feel lucky that I listened to my heart and listened to whatever my intuition said; I was like, "I'm gonna do that."

I was told by somebody in my life, "Don't listen to criticism and don't listen to praise.

Just do what you do."

upbeat percussion [leaves rustling in the wind] [waves crashing] uplifting ethereal music The thing is that if I have an idea based on one of my experiences, the material activate my imagination.

ethereal music I say, "Oh, I have this object and it's related with this narrative that I'm trying to organize."

And I start playing with it.

I incorporate that object.

Or I have to invent an object to the idea, putting this object related with this one.

It's a very organic way of organizing.

Here in Loza, the community, for me, is like an extension of my studio.

Nunu!

Mira.

Has visto mas resortes?

En el paseo Suarez.

Tengo que hablar con-- Has visto mas en la carretera?

Si por eso... Everything have been choosen to react against.

Here, look at this.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

Look at that.

[Daniel VO] It takes time, I feel it.

You have to be there all the time.

You have to live with the piece.

I literally sleep with a notebook and with a pencil there so I could trap the idea.

It's interesting how sometimes you are sleeping and then a solution comes.

And then there is a day when you go to the studio and there is an harmony.

"Oh, there it is."

My intention with this approach is, among other things, to remember.

[man VO] The first pictures now coming in from Puerto Rico.

Hurricane Maria slamming into the island and, as you heard, one official saying the island is destroyed.

[man VO] Tonight, Maria's direct hit, devastating Puerto Rico.

[Daniel VO] I remember listening the roof of the house.

I was by myself, and the sound of the wind... [cacophonous noises], you know.

It was really terrible.

Then, I opened the door.

I wasn't supposed to do that, of course.

It was something else.

And that's what I'm trying to do with this.

How could I talk about the terrible and the sublime at the same time?

tense ambient music Bit by bit, I was gathering debris from the hurricane.

The tarp comes like a sea.

See here?

Like a sea.

Water... sand, represented by the burlap.

The rays of the storm, we use copper and aluminum.

The thunder.

[drum booming] So music, rhythm, sound are related with the theme too.

And here, there is a figure that might be pointing to Virgin Mary.

The hurricane was called "Maria," and Maria is the mother of Christ.

For me to cite the iconic representation, there is a contradiction there: Virgin Mary in the context of destruction.

The way that these houses are built, they are not built in order to support the strength of a hurricane.

So I'm talking about the problem of housing, too -- the people with less resources to build something strong and properly in order to live in this area in the Caribbean.

Something that I remember from my childhood is that plant with those flowers.

So imagine this road without this -- sand and a lot of trees, but the same road.

[dog barking] [Daniel VO] The experience of catastrophe, that's not exclusive of Puerto Ricans.

There is a universality, regardless where you live in this world.

People have to invent again.

When you don't have electricity, you don't have water, you have to be inventive.

And it's interesting because knowledge from the past came again.

I remember when I was a child here in Loza, everybody was doing something.

My grandmother was a sewer, my uncle Louis was a mask maker, and my other uncle was a cabinet maker.

So you could imagine the activities as a child, working with tools and woods and things.

It was beautiful!

emotional music I like to construct something that have unity, even though I am using diverse materials.

They are all alive, you know?

For me, that's language.

The way you arrange them to obtain unity, there I find beauty.

[buzzing] La apertura se supone que la tienes que hacer aqui.

[Daniel] Intenta sacar el sonido que tu qiueras.

-Intenta!

-[Jorge] Yes.

[conch blows] [blowing continues] Seems like already the Spaniards were here killing Indians.

Like a lament, the longing of something that has disappeared, you know?

Which is that land before Columbus arrived.

Use your imagination, yeah!

Recreate that in your mind and then bring it through the -instrument, yeah!

-Okay.

I'm gonna be trying to do what our Taino Indians used to do, and that is play it with the sound that was what they used to communicate.

He was my student.

[laughs] [Jorge] If you didn't learn something with Daniel... -[chuckles] -You are not in the right place.

He doesn't take a "No."

No, invent yourself, reinvent.

Yeah, he pushes you to the limit.

"Okay, listen, try it."

rapid drumming [conch blows] upbeat percussive music Vamos por una mas grande.

Mscara, Victor!

[man VO] Es el nico pueblo en Puerto Rico fundado por personas de la raza negra.

Pero nnca nadie me habl del continente Africano.

Como Afro descendiente que soy.

No importa como la gente lo tome, pero Espaa no puede ser mi madre patria.

Mi madre patria es frica.

drumming [woman] El "real estate" es su religin.

Los impuestos que los pgue yo.

Nos vieron en el piso, nos patearon las costillas y se aprovecharon con inversiones, con influencia, con todo lo que pueden comprar con dinero.

"No pueden vivir alli, eso es un Airbnb"... uplifting music Como comunidad, como gente que va a traspasar tradiciones e historias, hay que seguir cumpliendo con esa responsabilidad, para sobrevivir.

[man VO] Estuvimos en la escuela juntos.

Somos familia, hemos tenido un trayecto largo en la vida muy buena.

[wind blowing] [crackling and popping] [grunts] ethereal ambient music [Rose VO] There's something so important about witnessing.

Anything is a witness, even inanimate things -- or we consider inanimate things.

This is an idea I was working out for a public art piece I'm working on where... these sort of ancestor beings are watching.

My art is basically taking a moment of that experience.

uplifting ethereal music I'm building these beings that are then reflecting my process back to me, but it's also going out into the world and watching.

[Rose] That's that.

I figured out if I use clay that's very thin, I have to be very present with the process and I have to just do it.

You can't, like, go back and fix it later and, you know, carve stuff down.

It has no... forgiveness, in a sense; it is what it is.

So you have to just be with it.

So now that I started this, I have to finish it today.

This is New Mexico Clay, where I get my clay.

I really like putting different clays together, just as a aesthetic, but also the idea of, like, we're all made up of many different things, and we're trying to understand ourselves and be... you know, compassionate and graceful and accepting of all the many things that we all are.

Because I'm mixed blood, I was always hyper-aware of how I wasn't fitting in.

And as a multicultural two-spirit person, I'm always navigating one foot in two worlds.

[laughs] And so, you know, the clay gets to do that too.

ethereal ambient music I'm trying to reveal our deep truth and that deep truth is process, and so why would I hide?

Why would I hide that process?

To allow it to have fingerprints and to show the touching and the making, the making -- the actual making of something -- is our power, right?

Is our greatness.

That's why I love going to ancestral homes or ruins, you know?

And seeing the fingerprints in the plaster.

It's like, "Whoa, those are my ancestors' hands that were here making just like we make," you know?

[Rose VO] Right now, we're here in Santa Clara ancestral homelands.

My people were living here between these mountain ranges along this river for thousands of years.

This was our place long before European contact.

It's considered a tri-cultural place, where we have the Indigenous ancestry, and then the Spanish, and also the English-speaking colonizing.

Many of us are descendants of all those things, like myself.

Still a lot of anger and hurt.

People are navigating that inherited historical trauma.

But it's also home; I am of this place very deeply.

[Rose] Yep.

See that right there?

So this was a big reservoir right here.

The water would come down.

Ancestors used to catch the water up here for drinking and stuff -- for farming, even.

[Rose] Mm-hm.

[Rose VO] I've been coming here since I was a kid.

[Rose] There you go, now try.

[Rose VO] The proof of people's bodies interacting with the place and old sites where you see, like, plaster still on the walls and you see that handprint or, like, fingerprints in old pottery shards or whatever, it's like this very relatable moment.

This is ancestry in the making, and we're in that, right?

We're given this line and this heritage and this story to continue.

soft ambient music -[Rose] 'Cause they're cute?

-[Cedar] Yes.

[Roxanne] That's really good.

-I made a snail.

-[Rose] Hey, you made a snail!

That's cute!

Look at its eyeballs.

[Rose VO] The person I love to make things the most with is my mom.

She learned to communicate through her clay, and she was given clay through her mom; it was a matrilineal gift.

It's like we leapfrog in a funny way, because as she learned from me, then I learned from her because she tries something I never tried.

It's quite a blessing to be able to have a child [chuckles] that can walk the trail with you.

[Rose VO] Whether we're plastering a house or laying adobes or planting a field, to be able to make work that's building a conversation together is a really beautiful tool that we have to heal.

I often think about relationships within Indigenous world, and we have this big heart to exist and to empower ourselves and to change the narratives and express what it means to carry this story forth.

uplifting music I kept making these objects of empowerment.

I made warriors for years that were sort of in this state of being empowered and not being aggressive or confrontational, but just -- boom -- in itself.

In that, we're transforming that victim narrative.

I think I'm looking for that inside myself, and the car was actually inspired by growing up in Espaola -- Espaola is the low rider capital of the world -- seeing people who are very disempowered in lots of ways but totally proud of their experience and their car.

[engine rumbling] The love and energy they put into this piece of art, I remember thinking, "When I grow up, I want that feeling of being complete and protected and whole and I become that piece of art and I'm carrying myself with pride."

So when I came back from graduate school, I was like, "I'm gonna go find that."

And at that time, that looked like "Oh, muscle cars; I need it to go real fast and be real loud."

aggressive rock music The base color is called "hot rod black," which is a satin.

I taped it off, and then I threw a glass clear on top, which is what gives it this kind of gloss versus matte.

The pattern is based off of traditional patterns from this area of pottery designs.

We have, like, the traveling spiral, we have mountains and clouds, and then we have feathers coming back here.

It's rooted in this place, and if you take it outside of this area, it doesn't make much sense.

sensitive ambient music I named her "Maria" after Maria Martinez, who was a master potter and also an innovator from San Ildefonso Pueblo.

She developed the black-on-black style, and that is a very, very, very specific aesthetic color choice to this area.

I started doing performances I was calling "Transformances" 'cause the intention was to actually change.

I was transforming.

I'm trying to evolve and transform my perspective.

We were using the car and taking up spaces, locking up roads, and marching up with what I call "post-apocalyptic Indigenous regalia."

I put these subwoofers in the El Camino, and I played a heartbeat just super loud -- gu-gung, gu-gung, gu-gung -- while we were walking, and the car-- [mimics engine sound], right?

And then, this, like, gu-gung.

They closed off the streets and we just walked slow with this car.

[engine revving] You wanna get your, like, adrenaline going.

It was like, "We're in the post-apocalypse now, we've experienced this for hundreds of years.

Now look at us; we're just gonna claim it, we're gonna be in it," right?

After my daughter came into my life, I did another "Transformance" in Las Vegas, Nevada with a collaborator, Fawn Douglas, who's Southern Paiute, and we ended up taking up space with our bodies very simply and meditatively, and we ended up not using the car.

sensitive piano music I was carrying my daughter, and there was two mothers and two daughters.

I realized that what empowerment is looking like for me is changing, and it actually is changing from this genderqueer, more-masculine space to actually accepting the feminine and understanding that I can stand in my femininity and still feel that power.

The marks all mean something, right?

So for this one specifically, I keep thinking about, like, marking of time and marking of the steps and this monotonous-but-also-dedicated process.

The wings flapping of migrating birds, it's this, like... You just go, you just go, you just go.

This chick acts like she knows what she's doing.

It'll fit!

I think it'll fit.

I hope it fits.

Pretty close to that.

Good job, baby!

Let's get this done, and thank you for your hard work.

[Rose VO] There is no separation between art and life.

I feel like my life has been being in between.

When you can't ever be comfortable in one place, the discomfort can create an incredible environment for investigation.

You have to kind of fall back and close your eyes and hope that where you land is exactly the place you need to go.

sparse ethereal music [man VO] Let there be light.

He can't hide, try as he might.

A man at night making a pathetic attempt at connection... [spraying] to connect with anyone in an empty room.

Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

Here is the man.

Here is the man.

Here is the man.

I've seen the man perform.

I've seen the man try and hide.

[man] Okay, ready to roll?

[woman] You can stand up straight, Alex.

[Alex] Yeah, is it okay?

-[woman] Yeah.

-[woman] Yeah, that's fine.

-[woman] We could reach you.

-[woman] We can reach.

[Alex] Okay.

[woman] It was just for the top of your head I needed... [Alex] Okay.

curious jazzy music [Alex VO] These characters or images or objects exist within a world of dreams.

curious electronic music I just want to have my mind be freer than it is and that doesn't come easy to me, so to spend time with these characters in this devotional research-based way is to say, "I don't know if I'll ever change, but I try to, at least."

There is distance between myself and the people in the past who have influenced me.

If I think of some kind of icon as a flat symbol, how do I give it depth?

I want that, I think, of the people I admire or the people that confuse me.

I want depth.

There we go.

Uh, wait, but is it all the way up on the shoulder?

[man] Yes.

[Alex VO] I had a kind of very long and winding path to be an artist.

I was a young person in my early 20s and studying animation, and I didn't know how to go forward to-- if I wanted to make sculpture, I just didn't know how to proceed.

All of the people making sculpture were using the wood shop or the metal shop, and those places did not feel safe for a young gay guy.

Like, I didn't know how to find myself there.

When I was sort of feeling like I was at an impasse and kind of had... had some time to think about how I wanted to make a sculpture, I looked to my grandmother and started sewing.

In particular, I made this large ketchup bottle.

dreamy ambient music I filmed myself performing this thing where I replicated a photograph of Claes Oldenburg carrying a toothpaste bottle down the street but this was a large ketchup bottle, and I walked through the streets of Philadelphia with this big ketchup bottle.

And that was my sort of first entry into sculpture and also sewing as this kind of powerful act of finding yourself.

This idea of embracing these things, softening these things that seem to be hard is my way of taking down that machismo a notch and to say, like, "There's room for a gentler, more tender way of understanding what it means to be human."

Everyone I work with is doing the same thing and wanting the same thing of their lives.

There's a whole community of people working towards something new and unknown.

None of us know what this will be in the end, and that, I think, is-- that's why we all come to the studio every day is, like, to just get into what we don't know.

We'll just see how far this gets us.

Yeah, I mean this will change tomorrow, but that's... what we want.

So this is a remake of Claes Oldenburg's Mouse Museum, and it's a work that he initially made for Documenta.

I remember, like, wanting to just be around stuff, small plastic objects.

My room growing up probably had just, like, lots of buckets of this kinds of stuff that I would collect.

And I have sort of amassed all of my objects and small sculptures that I've made and things that are important to me, things that just kind of made up my sculptural vocabulary, but in miniature.

This little Big Bird mockup, this was sort of the genesis of the work for The Met.

[Alex VO] My work, when I'm replicating something, doesn't end with replica, 'cause for me, it's also important to collage what has been replicated and put it into a new world.

uplifting ethereal music It allows for those characters or images or objects to exist within a world where logic is kind of reinvented or paused or slowed down or reversed, and what we think we know and how we think things should be is now undone.

I guess at an early age, when I said I wanted to be an artist, I just thought that was making Disney drawings.

I wanted to participate in the magical world that that space allowed me to exist in.

I grew up in the suburbs of Jersey and Pittsburgh, and I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela.

As a young person, when you move around a lot, it can be unsettling, and so I think that's kind of how I became a dreamer -- because I was living in a place and then leaving the place, and then you long for the place that you were living.

You kind of live in some sort of space that's not actually underfoot but quite far away in your mind.

The homes I'm making, they're very fragmented.

They're collages of many places and many versions, I think, of myself.

How does one look forward and then also understand the past and where they came from?

I have always come to this particular gallery for this Brancusi.

How I have always understood Brancusi was this notion that, like, the sculpture -- from the top to the ground -- is all one.

Your foundation or what might be a pedestal is actually part of the work, and as I interpret that, our roots and our history matters as much as what is present or what we see or what is visible at the top.

And so then I think, again, about this work and how to respond to it or unravel it.

I think that's often what I want when I spend time with these works is to say, "It worked for you then, but how can it work for me now?

And let's hug it out."

[figure in video] When I saw you... and that girl talking... [Scott] All right, let's go ahead and roll.

All right, ready?

And... action.

So we could cut to some kind of version of that.

[Scott] Oh yeah, we can use a piece of it.

Do you wanna do it again or move on?

-Let's do one more.

-[Scott] Okay, cool.

soft piano music Today, Alex is shooting this sequence of the film in which Marcel Duchamp gets dressed into drag is Rrose Selavy, which is a fictional persona that Duchamp came up with, and he's going to be performing a song under a pink spotlight.

[Alex VO] You know, my parents pulled me aside and said, "Well, what does it mean?"

[chuckles] They were like, "Why ketchup and why these characters?"

And I was like, "These are my safe spaces."

And as strange as my ideas may be, to make sure that they still can communicate some sort of kernel of what it means to be human, that's what matters to me; that's, like, the driving force of why I work and how I work, I think.

[Rrose Selavy] [in robotic voice] Why do birds Suddenly appear [applause] Every time That you're near? Ooh-wee baby Just like me They long to be... [Alex VO] Walking the line between the person that you really are and the person that you long to be or the person that you once were, we are constantly negotiating and renegotiating those things to be, you know, the perfect human.

I don't know if I'll ever fully understand it, but I know that one puts things into the world because they want to ask questions, and I hope I learn something new.

And that is why soft uplifting music