(Music) (End of music) So we were lied to, or maybe we weren’t told the full story. Maybe our parents and our teachers didn’t want to tell us about the horrific history that we have. I remember my freshman year of college. I learned about the murder and lynching of Emmett Till. And my mom never told me about it. So that weekend when I went home, I asked her, said: “Mom, why didn’t you ever tell me about Emmett Till?” And she told me that: “I didn’t want to fill your head with that nonsense.” A lot of our history is omitted because it's not carried out. Because maybe my mom wanted to protect me. But sometimes leaving out information can be just as detrimental as a lie. I'm a multidisciplinary artist. I make work around mass incarceration, genocides, lynchings and enslavement. And I believe that we can take images and artifacts from the past and bring them forward to help us make decisions today, because those issues that I mentioned, they impact us today. I’ve been collecting objects - I’ve about 50,000 objects now, and I want to use these objects to tell stories so we can actually correct false narratives about so many things that we've been told. And I made it my mission to talk about coordinated exclusion. Who’s been left out of history and who has been put in justly or unjustly. So one of the objects that I've collected, probably about 7 or 8 years ago, was this picture of Geronimo - this is from 1886. Geronimo is the second person from the right, on the horse. And Geronimo surrendered three times in about ten years, during the American Indian Wars, which is the longest running genocide in our history in the United States. There were more than 15 million Native Americans killed. I have a trivia question for you: does anyone know when Native Americans were granted citizenship in the United States? It’s not a joke. Does anyone know? 1924. So no, they were not citizens. And does anyone know when they were given the right to vote? Not until 1965, with the Voting Rights Act. A couple of years ago, I started collecting more and more images on genocide. Armenian genocide. And this genocide that happened between 1918-1921, can anyone tell me the location of this genocide? It was against the Jewish people of that location. Around 250,000 Jewish people were killed and 300,000 children were orphaned. Did anyone have the answer to this question? Russia or Ukraine actually. During the Russian Civil War. I got really fascinated with genocides. There were so many genocides that have happened since we’ve been living. I remember Rwanda vividly, I remember Bosnia vividly. And we currently have war in Sudan, or genocide in Sudan, the Congo and the genocide in Gaza, which is actually the most well documented genocide in history right now, because everything’s taking place in front of us in real time on social media. Question: what year did the United States intervene on the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were being massacred in Nazi Germany? Does anyone know? Not 43. No? Actually, that answer is right: never. The US never intervened on the Holocaust. We didn’t get into World War II until later, until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Well, there were a few reasons we didn't get into the war. There was overt anti-Semitism in the United States. It wasn’t in the United States’ financial interest to get into the war, because we had just gone through the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. A lot of my images are about horrific events that have happened, and there are so many of them, but I also collect things around empowerment. This image here is of Maria Tallchief. She's the first prima ballerina in the United States, and she's Native American. And a lot of times people want to say: “She’s the first Native American prima ballerina.” No, she was the first prima ballerina. And for someone in the arts, such as myself playing cello, that’s not traditionally played by someone who looks like me, And I also played bass in orchestras. Knowing someone like her is really important, because many times I would play in orchestras and I would be the only black person in the orchestra. And sometimes during concerts, I'd be the only black person in the whole auditorium. So representation matters and she matters. One of my other favorite fascinating stories is about Harriet Quimby. She wanted to be a pilot. And in 1911, most men didn’t want to teach her. The Wright brothers did not believe that women should fly. This is something we don't talk about very much. So she kept pursuing and she got her pilot’s license. She had found someone that would teach her. After she got her pilot’s license, she became the first woman pilot in the United States. Shortly after that, she crossed the English Channel, the first woman to do that, and tragically, three months later, she was the first woman to die in a plane at 37 years old. I have something special for you. I want to show you a picture of Harriet Quimby that probably hasn't been seen publicly in over 100 years. This is it. But it’s important. Every time I take a flight, when I get on the plane, I see who’s flying the plane. And I’m always happy if there’s a woman flying. But if it's anyone other than a white man, I get excited. Because if you’re a young woman, or anyone, and you see any kind of diversity in who’s doing these jobs, it helps all of us. The Harlem Hellfighters was a story I didn’t hear about until much later. They were black soldiers from this area, and actually different places as well, not just from Harlem, who trained in South Carolina and they fought in France, during World War I. Amazing story. At the same time, black people were scrutinized in ways that other people were not scrutinized. There was an ideology going around. Who can tell me what does Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller, and John Harvey Kellogg, what do they have in common? Anyone? (Public) Inventors. PR: Not inventors. Not as flattering as inventors. They all believed in eugenics. Eugenics. They all believed that there was a hierarchy in the gene pool. Their goal was to keep the gene pool pure. And the eugenics movement believed in forced sterilization, and eugenics was also used in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, as far as their ideology for the justification of exterminating and killing 6 million Jewish people. These are the Harlem Hellfighters coming back to a hero’s welcome. It’s an amazing story. I have a lot of images about these stories. And what do I do with these stories? Well, I decided that these objects are pretty much useless if I don’t share them. So I bought a building to put the objects in. Then I decided what to do with this building? I’m going to figure out something to do with this building, to share the objects and things. And I asked my friend to help me figure out a name for this new building. And she asked: “What street is it on?” I said: “It’s on Cary Street.” She said: “OK, name it : Cary Forward, as if you’re carrying information to the future, to help, you know, us. So, I named it: Cary Forward And then later I decided to find out what Cary was and what Cary meant. Well, Cary was an enslaver from the 1700s. (Laughter) It’s funny that gets the most laughs today. I kept the name as Cary Forward, as a reminder of the ground that we walk on, and the people, the monuments are really the streets as well as the actual statues and monuments. So I decided to move forward with building this building, and it’s going to be more than just an empty space, because it’s only a building unless you have things happening within it. It’s going to be a place where people are going to get together, where the artifacts are going to be stored. These glass cases here are going to be a view to the basement, so you can see artifacts and restoration of archives and photographs as well. It’s going to have multi-levels, a gallery up top, and a cafe in the middle. In the basement there’s going to be artifact lending library. There's a podcasting studio. And at the very back here, there's a visiting artist studio for artist residency so they can actually benefit from the archive. What is the big bet here? Why build a new museum? When a lot of these images were made, it wasn’t a priority to tell the story of women, or other groups that have been coordinately excluded. It’s time to tell those stories from the past so we can empower us today. I have a personal story to share with you. The next images I want to play for you are images of child labor. My father was born in 1905. He quitted school to work in third grade. That was common then. Recently I heard about this factory that was hiring kids, employing kids as young as 13, to work in a slaughterhouse, working with hazardous chemicals and dangerous machinery. We're going backwards again. I want Cary forward to be a resource to remind us of how we need to protect children, all children, so they can all have a childhood. So I’ll leave you with these images. (Music) (End of music) (Applause)
