- Patience, cut down on background noise
and keep your video off to focus on the presenters.
During our Q&A,
you may have the opportunity to unmute yourself,
turn on your camera and ask a question,
and there's those camera and mic buttons on your screen.
And if you want to pin a presenter,
those little three dots next to that presenter's name,
will give you that option to pin,
which would put that person first on your screen.
Secondly, closed captioning is available,
there should be a link going in the chat shortly.
And Erica Andrus is here to provide technical assistance
if you're having difficulty.
And I want to introduce her as the organizer of this event,
she is Senior Lecturer and Director of Jewish Studies
at UVM.
I also want to mention up top that there may be content
in this presentation that is difficult for some.
So one second,
I will introduce the speakers who altogether
will speak for about an hour,
and then there'll be a bit of discussion
among the panelists,
and then we will open to audience Q&A.
If questions occur to you
as you're listening to the speakers,
please feel free to put those questions in the chat.
And I will try to get to as many as possible
during the Q&A session.
During the audience Q&A part,
in addition to continuing to put questions in the chat,
you can also raise your hand, which let's see,
there's a little happy face with a hand that's
and then there's the raise hand option under that.
So you can raise your hand.
Erica will help me by calling on you,
then you can unmute yourself,
turn on your camera if you want
and ask your question out loud,
muting in teams can take an extra second.
So press it and give it a second
before you start pressing again.
Without further ado, I will introduce tonight's artists.
Robin Atlas is a visual artist, printmaker,
fine arts consultant and curator
whose work has been exhibited throughout the United States.
She creates contemporary visual midrash,
the process of investigating Hebrew, biblical,
and other sacred Jewish texts, as well as halachic laws.
Adding her own artistic voice
envisioned the ever evolving in theology of commentary.
Her mixed media pieces combine dyed, manipulated,
and collaged fabric and other fibrous materials,
which have then been deconstructed and embellished
with hand and machine embroidery,
paper, paint, beadwork, trim, and other elements.
She's the co-founder of Vector Artists Initiative
and the current president of the American Guild
of Judaic art.
Nancy Current has been a studio artist in Seattle
since 1987, working on glass and paper using drawing,
painting monotype, and screen printing techniques,
her artwork visually interprets Jewish religious
and cultural texts
in the tradition of contemporary visual midrash.
She has exhibited nationally and in Canada
and taught classes and lectured
in the US, UK and Germany.
Since 2013 as a co-founder of Vector Artists Initiative,
she exhibits and co-curating
with the AI artist, Robin Atlas.
Jen Berger works as an interdisciplinary community
and socially engaged artist and educator.
Jen has developed a toolbox of creative skills,
including street stage and guerrilla theater,
visual arts, painting, printmaking, puppetry,
and video that she uses to foster dialogue,
raise awareness and intervene in social issues
that affect us all.
Jen works as a teaching artist,
working with students from early childhood to adult age
and host creative and educational workshops
throughout the community to engage in dialogue and action.
Along with individually designed projects,
Jen is creating community engagement opportunities
through her project At the Root.
She is currently adjunct faculty at the community college of
Vermont and Champlain college.
Misoo was born in the Bronx in 1918, but I'm sorry,
that would be a really long time ago, you guys, 1980,
(chuckles)
but moved back to her parents' homeland of South Korea,
when she was a one-year-old.
A short 17 years later,
she returned to the US for the ambitions to use painting
as her mode of emotional communication and storytelling.
Misoo has exhibited in a number of galleries and museums,
including the Boca Raton Museum of Art,
Southern Vermont Art Center, Bailey Contemporary Arts,
Florida Atlantic University, Durham Arts Council,
Palm Beach State College, University of Texas,
the University of Vermont Living Learning Center
and the Fleming Museum Girls' Club in Fort Lauderdale,
Burlington City Arts, Champlain College,
Vermont Arts Council,
and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel-Aviv.
Misoo was selected as one of Art New England's
10 emerging New England artists in 2019
and a Vermont artist to watch in 2020.
Misoo currently lives and works
in South Burlington, Vermont, and can be reached
at misoo@misoo.org.
Robin and Nancy will be presenting together
on their curatorial and artistic collaboration.
Take it away, Robin and Nancy.
- Yeah, there we go.
Unmuted, is that better?
- Oh, we're unmuted.
And we're gonna share our screen, I think, with everyone.
- Open share tray.
- Right.
- Okay, and then we go to desktop.
- This one right here.
- Thank you.
(giggles)
- And then go to the top.
So hello everyone, thank you, good evening.
Thank you for coming this evening.
First, I wanted to thank all of our co-presenters
for being here this evening
and Andrea Rosen for moderating
and keeping us all on track
and especially to professor Andrus
for inviting Nancy and I in the first place.
Wanted to talk to you a little bit about our project
Art Vector does called
On the Consequences of Hate Speech.
Nancy and I met, I don't know, almost a decade ago,
and we founded Vector in 2013
and we did it specifically to produce
what has now become On the Consequences of Hate Speech.
We spent the first couple of years writing our proposal
and the second couple of years sending it out.
And in 2017,
we were invited by the Bowen Island Arts Council
to do a version
of On the Consequences of Hate Speech at their gallery.
The next two incarnations that Nancy and I did,
we talked about expanding the conversation
to include more artists having a voice in this conversation.
And so in addition to our two narratives,
Lashon Hara and Ladon Vador,
we curated other artists from the community.
Right now we're curating for a fourth incarnation
of On the Consequences of Hate Speech,
which will be an online exhibit because of COVID.
And also because it allows us to be more inclusive
and to do this exhibit for far less money
than it would cost us to do it in a brick and mortar,
and then everybody's shipping their work to us.
By way of background, Nancy and I combined again,
our narratives, Lashon Hara and L'dor Vador
And for those of you who don't know
- (mumbles) speech, okay?
- Oh yeah, go ahead.
- Thank you.
Yeah, sorry.
And for those of you that don't know the term Lashon Hara
literally means evil speech.
It has many different pronunciations
and different spellings, but it means evil tongue.
It's a Hebrew term we use for gossip or slander
or other malicious or derogatory speech or communication.
I find Lashon Hara to be so destructive to our society
because it pits us against one another,
rather than encouraging us
to be compassionate, collaborative, and unified.
There are many ways that we spread Lashon Hara
or evil speech by talking, by writing,
by calling on the phone, by texting one another,
by Twitter, and most notably in this day and age,
our social media, Facebook, and otherwise.
Initially Lashon Hara grew from an experience I had
in my own community.
I actually gave a neighbor a ride home from a women's event
that was at my rabbi's house,
and on the way home,
she proceeded to excoriate me about what a bad Jew I was
that apparently I didn't live up to her Jewish ideal
or her Jewish expectation.
And I can't tell you all of the emotions
that I went through,
anger, I was speechless,
there were all kinds of things going on in my head.
And I talked, what had happened over with my rabbis
in a few days later,
and we talked about Lashon Hara and how destructive it was.
And after that talk, I started researching the topic
and the first seven pieces were born.
I'm gonna talk to you about three specific pieces.
The first one is called Thirty-One "31".
There is a very famous Polish rabbi,
whose name is Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan,
also known as the Chofetz Chaim.
And he was a very wise and learned rabbi
who wrote on many, many topics,
but he is most acclaimed for his writing on evil speech
on Lashon Hara and 31 is representative
of the 31 places in the Torah
where the Chofetz Chaim found Lashon Hara.
And then the round pods that you see,
the round circles on the piece are a recurring theme
that I use within the piece.
And those are the seeds of Lashon Hara
as they begin to grow.
I liken it to a plant that has a life,
and it creates seeds that fall to the ground and it grows,
and there's a circular, a circular process that happens.
Next slide, Nancy.
This next piece is also related
and it's entitled Three Murders.
What I was trying to do was I was trying to see
how Lashon Hara affected the physical realm,
how it affects us in a spiritual way,
but how it also affects the physical world.
And this piece depicts again,
these little circles of the pods of Lashon Hara,
31 times again replicating what the Chofetz Chaim found
the 31 instances of Lashon Hara in the Torah.
And then the three horizontal stripes
that you see in the middle of the piece
are representative of the souls that are murdered
when we speak Lashon Hara.
It has been said that Lashon Hara kills three souls.
It kills the soul of the gossiper,
the one who is talking about a person, gossiping,
it kills the soul of the person being gossiped about,
and it kills the soul of the person who is the listener,
the person who's hearing the gossip.
Nancy.
This last piece, I have four,
this third piece is the last in this little series
of narrative called In the Garden of Good and Evil
or Chilul Hashem, the desecration of the name of God.
And this is the poison that happens to the tree of knowledge
when we have corrupted it with speaking Lashon Hara.
And I have again with a whole narrative
has a recurring theme where I use some materials
over and over again.
And the black seed beans in the center
of the upper part of the tree are the seeds of Lashon Hara.
And then there's gold bugle beads that hang off the edge
of the top of the tree are the flowers,
and then the blue black seed beads
are the seeds that fall to the ground
and they grow pods that repeat the cycle L'dor vador
over and over again from generation to generation, okay.
Next.
And the last piece from my narrative of Lashon Hara
that I'm gonna talk about,
(coughs) excuse me,
is entitled Eruv.
Quite literally, according to Miriam Webster
Eruv is described as an urban area
enclosed by a wire boundary,
which symbolically extends the private domain
of a Jewish household into public areas,
creating a larger community.
And I did Eruv to be kind of a universal symbol
that when you saw it in a room that you knew that,
that that was a safe space,
that whomever was in that space was going to put their body
between you and whatever danger
you were going to be engaged in.
And it was a universal symbol.
The E at the foot of the Eruv
is a patch that connects different strips of cloth together.
And it is the letter shin, when you write it in cursive,
which is also the symbol for hashem.
Nancy.
- Okay, we'll go to my section of the OCHS exhibit.
Then this is my original.
Originally just my exhibit was L'Dor Vador
from generation to generation.
It's a series which focuses on a crucial Jewish principle,
teach the next generation.
Every individual stands at a convergence point.
Having learned from our teachers, parents, religions,
et cetera, we have the responsibility to pass along
our best distillation of that learning
to the next generation.
So I will show you some of the pieces from that.
These are glass paintings, which I'll discuss at first.
And this is the first one,
In Seeking Wisdom, the First Step is Silence.
And recognizing that teaching morality and values
requires knowledge and a sense of purpose
outside of one's own ego
I titled five of these glass paintings
with the teachings of Solomon ibn Gabirol,
excuse me, I got trouble with his name.
An 11th century Jewish philosopher and poet,
non sacred texts from the ginizah or the storehouse
in the synagogue in Cairo are silk screened onto the glass.
You can see them there in various,
in black and in gold to represent thousands of years
of Jewish tradition and rabbinical teachings.
This first one actually includes the land of Israel in it
because I feel that's an important part
of our tradition and teachings.
The second one here is,
In Seeking Wisdom, the Second Step is Listening.
This image evokes the teachings of the mothers,
especially proverbs and folk sayings
such as hatred is the fruit of fear.
And the implied architecture represents the home
and that the elements of that architecture
are taken from the border decorations
found in student primers.
Also from the Cairo ginizah.
I'm skipping a few here, I'm not doing them all
but the fifth step is teaching others.
This painting refers to a cheder,
a traditional Jewish boys school.
The text is both architectural and a reference.
I mean, the actual texts in the image
are both architectural and a reference to teaching.
And the pattern of color in the glass creates movement
and applies communication between the generations.
This is the last one of the series.
So this is the sixth one,
so the title is taken from the Book of Psalms,
a light passing through glass has a spiritual quality,
which is why I choose it as a canvas light
also refers to the transmission of learning
besides teaching children,
I want important ideas from rabbinical texts
to benefit humanity in general.
That's why in addition to the vertical structure here
representing teaching between generations,
there's also the triangular light going out
from the glass frame to promote those teachings to others.
We're going to go back to OCHS.
- So we're gonna share with you
some of the most excellent submissions
that became a part of
On the Consequences of Hate Speech III.
This first piece is an amazing work
by a very talented fellow named Vitaly Umansky.
It's entitled Facebook Rage,
and he has been struck by the fury
that swept over the country the last few years
that's been precipitated by social media.
He finds Facebook to be like an opiate,
a drug of the masses
that will take even the nicest looking,
most gentle mild men person,
and with enough social influence
can turn them into somebody we don't really even recognize.
Nancy.
- This painting from Tamar Hirschl Critical Current
was one of my favorite paintings in the whole exhibit.
Tamar spent much of her childhood as an immigrant.
So the immigrant experience of loss and tragedy
is especially meaningful to her.
She was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1939
on the eve of World War 2.
Trying to escape the Nazis,
her mother took Tamar and her sister
and fled towards Switzerland
but they were arrested in Hungary and imprisoned.
After their release, they walked back to Zagreb
and hid while on the run until the end of the war.
In 1948, her family immigrated to Israel,
living in poverty and tents and barracks in a refugee camp.
Critical Current addresses the tragedy of mass migration,
immigrants from North Africa crossing the Mediterranean
in boats are represented
by piles of empty orange life jackets,
their bodies, adults and children
wash up on the shores of Europe.
- I think Beth Haber is here with us,
and I don't know that she knew
that I was gonna screen this piece.
It's a fabulous piece, it's a fabulous piece.
And she and I kind of agreed on the premise
that the slippage between cause and consequence
begins with language.
It's corruption, it's failure, or its efficacy,
and what she wrote about was about this passage
from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
And it's the moment, it's that consequential moment
where a difference might have been made.
And if we have any questions about it,
I'm so glad she's here
because she can tell us more about it.
Thanks for making it Beth, it's just a fabulous piece.
- Yeah, it is.
These are three paintings by Leah Raab.
Leah was born in New Jersey and now lives in Israel.
Her work addresses universal themes of exile, immigration,
displacement, resettlement, and belonging.
Her artwork moves back and forth continuously between
different cultures of her homelands,
Europe, US, and Israel.
In Leah's words, Hitler used words
to propagate negative feelings and false beliefs about Jews.
The Holocaust began with poisonous speech
and led to outright hatred, abuse
and systematic destruction.
My paintings of the shoes scream
of the many murdered on the spot.
My paintings are a memorial to the Jews who are lined up
at the river's edge and shot into the Danube
and to my own family members in Hungary
who were brutally murdered by the Nazis.
- This is a really interesting piece by Maxine Hess.
It's a quilt and it has this wonderful mosaic quality
and it diffuses the imagery and what's going on with it.
And it's the story of Sonya King.
And I only learned about it
after Maxine made her submission,
but Sonya King was a delivery driver
for DoorDash of all places.
And one day she made a delivery to a racist
while wearing her headscarf
and he proceeded to try to grab it off of her head
and strangle her with it.
And as you might imagine,
the police were called and charges were filed.
And the guy who did it, what was his name?
Rick Painter, lovely fellow pled guilty
and was sentenced to 14 months
and ended up his sentence was reduced
to basically time served
by another fellow racist judge in that community.
And Maxine was just so outraged by reading about it
in the paper that she did a series of these quilts.
And she said,
my intention is to create portraits of hate crime victims,
to encourage dialogue about how to change the focus
from berating and belittling people who may look different
from others to accepting and appreciating their differences.
Nancy.
- Okay, this is Shoshanna Brombacher's work.
And as you can see, pretty wild stuff going on there.
In Jewish folklore, a Golem is a creature created
for the mud and clay of the earth
and is animated with cabalistic spells by a rabbi
to save the Jews in his community
from violent attacks by non-Jews.
A Golem is much larger than an average man,
has superhuman strength
and wreaks havoc on the inmates of the Jews.
And Shoshannah's words,
this Golem is my artistic response
to the riots in Charlottesville,
racists, antisemites, the KKK, white supremacists and others
promoted abject ideas
that split unity and harmony in this world.
They marched the streets with their flags and chants.
And initially were given only half of the blame
for the riots.
And our last piece from, Robin will describe.
- Yes, hi.
So this is the last piece in our presentation
that we have time for.
And it's by at the Pacific Northwest own, Marita Dingus,
it's called Rwanda.
And Rwanda, excuse me,
Rwanda is an orphaned Tutsi child
whose parents were murdered by the rampaging Hutus
in the 1994, civil war.
This massacre, it blew my mind when I found out,
but this massacre was fueled by the constant hate speech
by disc jockeys on the radio.
They ranted against the Tutsis
and they call them cockroaches
and all kinds of disparaging names.
And they encourage the Hutus
to take up machetes against them.
And they were excoriated and encouraged so much,
it was almost like what happened on 16.
They did take up arms against them
and there's just mass murder took place.
And the irony of all of this is this doll is created
with bits of found object and junk,
which is what Marita is known to work with.
And these people were murdered
as if they were just so much garbage.
And this piece just really resonates with me.
Nancy, anything you wanna sum up?
- Good place to end our long description.
We can only show a few pieces from this OCHS III show
but you can go to our vectorartistinitiative.com website,
and you can see the entire show,
which includes all the texts from the artists
describing their work and why it fit in the show.
It's really, we do enjoy putting on a show like this,
where we have meaningful artwork and text,
which allows you to have the artist's description.
So that's it from us.
- That is it.
We're gonna throw it back to Andrea.
- Now do we get out of here?
(laughing)
Escape.
(laughing)
- Impeccable timing you guys.
- I know.
- Erika did what I was about to do,
which is putting the link to your website in the chat.
So reach, go check that out to see if it works
and Jen is next.
- Great.
Wow, that was amazing.
Thank you so much.
And thank you to professor Andrus for inviting me.
And I'm so excited to be on the panel with everybody here.
Give me one second to figure out this.
This is my first time using Teams, give me one second.
I think I can get this.
Okay, it works.
Can you see that?
I'm assuming, yes, okay.
So before I jump into the projects
that I have been working on,
I wanted to contextualize my work or how I like to think
or hope that my work fits into the practice
or something called social practice,
which is the definition here.
This art encompasses a range of participatory strategies
that work outside traditional context,
to engage directly with the public, government
or other institutions to realize their activist goals.
And so really the art is made with a purpose
of intervening with something and activating.
So I'll start here with this project called
Amplifying Voices Mural Project.
This was created in 2015 with my collaborator,
Michelle Seyles.
And it was in response at, in 2015,
the planBTV: South End was coming back up for review
and BCA had a series of micro grants
that they were offering to artists
to do some research and gather some information
from the community to bring back to this weekend conference.
When some of the decisions were being made
about the future of planBTV.
And so what Michelle and I did is we worked with residents
of affordable housing, and in the South End,
there was three different affordable housing complexes
that we work with residents.
We did focus groups and interviews
and had like large conversations
and ask them about their hopes, their dreams,
what was working, what wasn't working,
and kind of put all this together.
We brought back a sketch to them.
They said, go for it and then we painted this mural.
I unfortunately don't have other pictures,
I know it's hard to see, but I'll try to explain,
you'll see back here, lake Champlain in the background,
there's a triptych up here, the side here,
it looks at mostly community gardens
and it really is about people feeling safe
together in the waterfront.
And there's people of many different skin colors
and backgrounds together feeling safe.
And that was something that residents really spoke about
that was important.
On the right side here, we see rooftop gardens and boats
and kind of leisurely and accessible things.
Right here is a solar powered bus stop,
we see Pine street, we see Pine street right across here.
This is before the crosswalks were put in,
so there was a hope for crosswalks to make it more safe
for more bus routes.
And then the middle here, what this represents,
is there a strong desire and need for a community center
that there was many residents,
not only we spoke to who either have mobility issues,
and, or are restrained financially,
and weren't able to access some services
in places that were downtown or in the North end.
And they just wanted something in their community.
So that's kind of the main components.
There's a lot more details in here.
And so we brought this to the weekend conference
in 2015 as part,
and trying to amplify the voices of these residents
in that conversation.
And the next project I want to talk about here
is the following year,
this is a project called Think of Others.
It was coordinated by Vermonters protesters
for peace in Palestine and Israel.
They wanted to highlight the work of poet, Mahmoud Darwish.
And so his poem think of others, I think,
no, I don't have it.
I thought I'd put the text in here,
is a seven line poem.
And each line has a counterpart think of others.
And then it is specific.
And so they asked seven artists, myself included,
to make a piece that talks about each of the lines.
So this is the entire project that was put up
at the Art Hop in 2016, where it got,
I would say, thousands of views.
And then this is the piece that I personally worked on.
And my line was, as you conduct your wars, think of others,
do not forget those who seek peace.
Okay, so in 2016, I came across a coloring book of women.
And I got so excited that these were, some of the women,
and many of the women in there
were women who had been inspirational to me
in parts of my life that I decided to take their portraits
and copy them onto Bristol board
and started painting portraits of them and painting them.
And that got so exciting as I was doing that more and more.
I decided to think about like,
who else has been influential to me in my life as an artist,
as a woman, as an activist, as an educator?
And then I started drawing and painting portraits.
And then as I kept going, I started thinking,
well, I should add biographies.
I want people to know about them.
I wanna know more about them,
but I want to know about them and share about them.
What I think their words would be,
not what we always put onto artists.
And so there was a series of 10 pieces.
This is Rachel Carson, Billie Holiday, Mother Jones,
Georgia O'Keefe, Yoko Ono, Alice Neel, Grace Paley,
Ella Baker, and then Alice Walker, and Paij Wadley Bailey.
So I've been working on these.
And I said, when I got to 10, I would stop.
And so last year I finally in the middle of the pandemic,
got to 10.
And I am very slowly been working on bringing this
to a press and having to put into a book.
So hopefully by the end of the summer,
that will be the case.
So in 2019, I thought it was important to,
I was doing a lot of workshops and teaching
and community work,
not represented here and really wanted to contain it
in a way that I could build that.
And I took the women's small business program
at Mercy Connections,
and this project At the Root was born.
I've been working on ever since.
What I wanna share with you from vest right now
is the work that I've been doing.
So as a workshop facilitator,
as one of the roles as an artist,
and I see that as a way of really bringing people together,
one to learn art and to build skills,
but also to make together, create together and share.
And in that, I think we build community.
And I see that as a way of fighting back
against all the different things that hate is involved in.
So first thing I wanted to just share here
was one of the first projects that At the Root did
was hosted a diorama exhibit called the artists
and 10 artists submitted dioramas
that address different pieces of climate change.
And we ended up having two openings,
this was the second one.
350 Vermont came and spoke about some of the issues
that were affecting us at that time.
And we talked to the artists,
I was able to talk about their work.
So it was really an opportunity to educate each other
through art and come together.
Then I continued to work with 350 Vermont.
I also worked with the Women's March.
So on the left-hand side,
this is when 350 Vermont was doing a statewide march,
and I worked with them.
I can see is this in here we kind of created these flags.
This is the stencil that we used,
that they all were on the march to identify themselves.
And then this was us making this giant banner
that was in the beginning of the march.
And then on the right-hand side, this was for,
I can't remember if it was the International Women's Day
or the women's march that happened at the state house
in January, but we had,
this was a compilation of the different signs and banners
that people made to address what was going on.
This was the call to artists for that.
Oh, and same thing in 2019,
I worked with CVO April's Fair Housing Month.
This was an exhibit that was up at Fletcher free library.
You'll see here is there is a very simple drawing
of a home
and invited people to come in and talk about
what home is to them.
And this is a way of really highlighting home versus house
and trying to combat issues of homelessness.
And so what we did was created these different,
it was kind of like refrigerator magnets,
but there were different pieces that people could write on
and then they could move them around.
And as people came in, they added a move it around
and became different stories and pictures.
And this is an early stage,
but it was pretty full by the end of the weekend.
This was a workshop I did in conjunction
with the Fleming museum called the Archives of Activism.
And so I worked with Alice Boone
and we talked about the importance of archiving,
of the work of activists and art
and how we are able to use art and art history
specifically to look at social movements
and the changes that they've made.
And so then we invited participants to,
we shared images that they from different movements
that they resonated with
and then taught linoleum block printing.
And so this is the workshop at my studio
with the hive in the south end.
Then this is just a fun Valentine's day (mumbles) making.
And then last on these workshops here,
this was I worked with Vermont
on access to reproductive freedom.
I've worked with them a couple of years in a row
doing screen printing and they make T-shirts and tote bags
and patches and sell them as a fundraiser
to raise money for women who are financially unable
to access abortions to make that available to Vermonters.
So that's that.
And then there's one more workshop
I just wanted to quickly mention, which is right here.
I'm still figuring this padlet thing out here.
Let's see, that work?
Here, nope.
There it is.
So last October in 2020, I was able to,
I am an adjunct faculty at Champlain college
and I was able to work with them
in my capacity as a teaching artist.
This is gonna take a second, it looks like the coming up.
And last year, the Vermont Humanities Council,
the Vermont reads book was The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas,
which is a fiction novel based on a family
whose community was affected by police violence,
where there was a murder
because of police violence in their community.
And so this book was written I believe in 2017.
And so people across the state are reading it
and Champlan college students are reading it.
So we held the workshop and basically they read the book.
We talked about the main,
these are images from the same workshop from earlier.
What the main images and the main, sorry,
the main issues that were in that book,
and then, you know,
three years later after the murder of George Floyd,
you know, there was a whole amplification
and new insight into the same issues that were in this book.
So we compared and contrasted
and talked about things were current.
And then the students were asked to make something
that resonated that they wanted to share
as ways of combating racism and hate.
And then they also, again,
learn from making were able
to make their own million prints.
I unfortunately don't have pictures from the workshop,
but I have this poster share.
Also last year, if you remember right around this time,
last year,
we were kind of in the beginning of a flurry
of climate change disasters that were happening.
And a lot of us were talking about the relationship of COVID
and climate change, how the public health piece of that,
how we were able to interact with it more, how we were,
how difficult it was to deal with some of these things.
And so 350 Vermont did a call to artists
and asked people to talk about those connections
between COVID and climate change.
And I will coastally so you can see
few other artists pieces.
This is available on online and also in print.
And then the piece I made is right here.
This is all digital.
And this was a story about a young whale that was found.
This is in June of last year,
a young whale that because of the quiet in the world
found its way into the Harbor
of the St. Lawrence in Montreal.
And it was kind of an awe and something not unexpected
and quite beautiful and scary,
like everything was happening at that time last year.
And then unfortunately,
a few weeks later they found the same young whale dead,
and it looked like it was the cause of a boat strike,
meaning that it was killed because of human activity.
And to me, the story represented so deeply
about the impact of responsibility and an agency
that we as humans have with climate change.
And so I submitted this.
So that's this piece here.
And then I wanted to also,
this is a little bit of a different piece.
But I wanted to share a little bit of the art
that I made over COVID, over the last year during COVID.
And it's just because for me so much about this
is about relationships
and it's about unexpected relationships
and relating more sometimes to topics and people.
This was a piece I submitted to somebody else's project
in Quebec, and she had sent out these packets of material
and embroidery yarn and said, you know, here's a topic,
make whatever.
So I wove together different fabrics
and embroidered the words abolish capitalism.
And that is a part of,
I think there was a few hundred people that submitted pieces
of work that she's gonna be putting together
in an exhibit.
And one of the things that I did last year
was with all the meetings in the Zooms
and kind of getting stuck on the couch
for long periods of time,
I picked up embroidery as a way to just keep myself occupied
and keep my mind, just keep things going.
And it was something that was kind of new to me, but,
and then this is an image of the workup
at the space gallery last year.
And the reason why I'm sharing this,
this is the one of the pieces I did before COVID,
but I didn't do a lot is that, and some of them were just,
(laughs)
I needed to get something off my test on this fun,
but you'll see, here's a fist.
These are vintage napkins.
So I didn't do this embroidery, but I added this.
It says always for love.
This says, I didn't hug, touch, kiss,
F another human being for 71 days.
So that was, I don't remember when that was,
but that was a hard moment.
And then if you remember,
rainbows were becoming the symbol for I'm okay.
People would put them in their windows
to let people know that they were okay.
And then CPU, SPS and vote.
And the reason why I wanted to share these was because
for me, the idea of connection to similar experiences
really helps us humanize these things and not feel so alone.
And I think in that humanizing and that feeling less alone,
that we can't hurt those that we know.
And so that helps us to stop othering people
and hoping to stop hating people.
I'm not sure where I am on time, but I think I'm okay.
This is, so I was scheduled to do
a series of murals last year,
before COVID hit in the old North end,
and then had to pivot like everybody else,
ended up doing one mural.
And this was the beginning of it.
And this was called, it was supposed to be,
we are the poor, the people in our neighborhood
and as called, we didn't expect this to happen.
And I surveyed people throughout Burlington
using online surveys and phone calls
to get everybody's experiences
in the first two months of COVID.
And so I painted this mural, you'll see here,
this is the beginning, this is the beginning of this.
There's the rainbow theme again.
And these are just based on interviews.
These are essential workers.
I have some folks helping me out.
You'll see the progress here.
This was rookies root beer,
one of the owners went around in a dinosaur outfit
that was very safe and mast and just made people laugh.
And for me, that stood out a lot.
That was something meaningful to me and other people.
So that got included.
This is the full mural here.
And so there's a little library,
there's the parade of cars or trucks
that say congratulations,
the ups truck that kept showing up.
And then all in here are little symbols of things,
such as bread that people were baking, sourdough,
coffee and tea, and calling.
There's a symbol here of calling the Department of Labor
and social media, upticks and biking.
And so things that were kind of prevalent
in everybody's lives at that time and in an uptick.
And then also I included, there's a little garden
Memorial garden for Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor
and George Floyd who were all murdered,
right around the beginning and of the pandemic last year.
So that was in the 2020,
and then I've one last project to share,
which just happened a couple of weeks ago.
It's called the opposite of hate is mending.
And this was a participatory installation
in which I built a wooden quilt.
I had 60 tiles that were cut in a laser cutter
that these are quilt squares.
And when people showed up at the event,
they were given markers and asked,
what do you need to mend our society, our community,
yourself, as we start transitioning out of this pandemic.
And while these were putting together,
here's an image of me here slowly putting this together.
There was three dancers here with fabric
and they braided the fabric together,
mending this piece of fabric back together.
And then there was live music happening at the same time
to hold that together, you can kind of see this in process.
Here's another picture in progress as this was going.
And so at the very end, where's the picture,
this picture here,
the dancers brought the fabric over as it was put together,
it was mended back together, braided,
and it was used as the quilt binding here.
And so this was a live installation
and everybody got to participate
and it was totally lovely.
And so I think that that's all I've got for everybody.
Let me figure out how to get back to the Teams.
There you go.
Okay, thank you so much for your time.
- Jen, thank you.
That was lovely.
And another impeccably timed (laughs)
(indistinct) things cool.
I'm gonna check that out.
And next we have Misoo.
- Hi everyone, I'm Misoo.
Thank you, Andrea for having me
and thank you Jen and Nancy and Robin
for sharing your stories and your work and your passion.
We're very informative and educational.
I am going to share my screen.
Can you see the screen?
- Yes.
- Yes, okay.
So I'll just minimize this.
Right, so my name's Misoo,
I am a visual artist who works to celebrate how our females,
especially Asian girls living in America
and also a woman
for domestic violence victims and survivors.
I am going to share some of my early works,
what I was making.
When I first came to America,
I came to America when I was 17
and I started painting as a form of communication
because my English was second language
and I had no way of communicating with other people.
So I start painting instead of speaking and writing.
At the time,
the reason I am showing this painting is
the girl that I start depicting when I was 17, 18 years old,
it was are very different than what I am painting right now.
I usually painted this alone girl images
who are usually trapped in her environment.
You can see her room is filled with bird cages,
which symbolized her entrapment.
She has a fake rings on her back,
which she cannot fly very well.
And that's just how I kind of how I was feeling at the time.
Came to America, not able to speak language,
I got diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes
and my dad just passed away.
And with all that going on, have no friends, no family.
My mom was a full-time workers, single mother,
just being in here, alienate me,
and I see myself very small compared to my environment.
I am now in this beautiful, humongous country
they call it United States of America.
And I have banquet in front of me,
which I am not sure if I can eat them, if I cannot.
I wasn't sure if I belonged here,
I always felt that I wasn't a welcome,
always felt I was this skinny, small, Asian girl
who will never be a main character in this country.
While I was in school, I started collecting porcelain dolls
and drawing in this very disturbing images
of them getting raped by invisible perpetrators.
I made many drawings of these dolls
and titled them the rape doll series.
And I was not sure why I was making these
over and over again until I found
that I had this repressed memory of a child sexual abuse
from my family members,
from when I was about 10 years old,
to like 13, 14 years old.
It was always there in back of my mind,
but I never had a courage to deal with it,
to speak up about it.
But I realized that it has been affecting my life
the whole time.
This one is called the gentleman's collection.
And then the girls usually,
the girls in my paintings usually are my self portrait.
They might not look like me, but they are myself,
emotional self portrait.
And I collected all these dolls around her
and she is on the couch,
also feeling trapped and behind the screen here,
there's a little hole and there's a gentleman
hiding behind the screen and peeking through this
and enjoying his pervasive collection
that he's tased and watching us.
So that really shows how I was feeling at the time,
that helpless little weak girl, Asian girl,
living in America.
This one is called a monster in me.
This is actually the first time I depicted my perpetrator
in my painting after I recovered the memory.
And even though I was a grown up woman now,
I was still afraid of this guy.
I was not able to confront him.
I was not able to speak up about it
and the waters filling up the room
because I'm scared of water.
I was almost drowned when I was little
and he's just dirty, fat, it's just melting down
and floating around the room and climbing back on my leg.
After awhile, I was having hard time.
It was very challenging to depict this narrative stories
of my memory.
So I changed to an abstract work
because it was a little easier to deal with it.
I did not have to see visual scene of a little girl
getting raped or a visual scene of a little girl
got trapped in her environment.
So I used the ink mark, abstract ink mark
to symbolize perpetrator.
And I drew this very delicate child's hair
that depicts a child, a victim,
and she is completely helpless.
She is completely under the power of a perpetrator,
and it really depicts how the child system is
at the time when she is getting raped,
she's getting sexually abused by her family members,
especially when a child does not have any place to go
for help.
The child is confused between abuse and love.
Child is questioning if she's okay, if this is my fault.
This one is called Over My Silent Body
and it's a depiction of child victim
overpowered by perpetrator.
These paintings are pretty large,
it is five feet high and eight feet wide.
The reason I used this large painting Nottage paper was,
I wanted to indicate two people the space where two people
are struggling together.
This is another one that depict a child,
the victim psychology it's called Ripped Apart.
I used the pink paints here
to indicate child's body fluid coming out.
I also used acrylic medium around the painting
to indicate perpetrator is ejaculating all around the paper.
So even though it was abstract piece,
I was exploring how I was feeling at the time.
It was the first time I was kind of understanding
and then understanding what happened to me
and expressing it through art.
As the work to develop, the hair got stronger,
the hair got darker and longer.
And I called these a mother's hair because I was a new mom.
And I drew this hair probably about 300 plus hours
on the paper.
And because I was crawling on the paper after 15 minutes,
my wrist hurts, neck hurts, back hurts, everything hurts.
And that pain was significant while I was making the art
because I was making more and more of a mother's hair
to fight with the perpetrator that I will pour all over.
After I drew like 300 plus hours of hair,
mother's hair and a child hair underneath it,
I ruined this painting by pouring ink all over,
because that was what it was.
That was the perpetrator ruined that precious moment.
It ruined the precious life of a child.
This is close up of that same piece after the ink was dried,
I was still upset that the ink is covering all the hair,
so I pour water on top of it.
And I was physically fighting the perpetrator
on my huge paper, I was scratching it,
I was ripping it and I was scrubbing it.
So this hair, mother's hair was revealed
underneath this dark ink
is still covering a child's hair as a protector.
I called this piece, I am The Barrier.
This is another piece that I,
oh, this is the only piece that I used my figure,
and my daughter's figure in the abstract piece
is me and my daughter hugging, and we are in emotion.
That's why you see like two heads of my daughter's head,
couple hands of my hands.
And this one is eight feet wide,
no eight feet high, and 15 feet wide piece.
And I titled this one, Cocoon
and me and my daughter are here in this mess together.
And I am protecting her with my experience, my memory.
After a while, years of making these abstract pieces,
I change it the piece,
I display these pieces vertically instead of horizontally,
and the piece got bigger too.
Now it is five feet wide and 15 feet long.
And I changed the display from horizontal to vertical
because now it is not a bad shape
where two people are struggling,
but it is a shape of a mother's long hair,
a mother's strong hair.
And instead of I am trapped in perpetrators territory,
I am inviting the perpetrator inside my territory.
On top of this paper, I ripped the perpetrator.
Sometimes I'd attach tapes on it and pour ink,
and I ripped the paper off with the ink.
So I am removing the perpetrator from my territory,
and I am also displaying that for everybody to see.
So I am displaying, this is the perpetrator,
this is the person who hurt us, hurt me when I was a child.
Through this, I gained a lot of power, as you can see,
I start as this powerless, weak victim, a little child.
When I first regained a memory of domestic childhood abuse,
I couldn't really function.
I wasn't able to make any more art.
I had to this slump for a while.
And then I start making abstract work,
depicting myself as a child victim.
And then that child victim grew to be a mother,
and that mother become a protector and a creator.
This is kind of how I start.
This one is actually getting bigger,
five feet wide and 30 feet long.
I seen myself keep thinking I was trapped in this
dark ink pieces.
So that's why he was getting longer and longer.
You can kind of see me in the middle of the piece
so you can kind of see how big it is
and how time consuming to make these pieces is.
After awhile, because I felt so captured,
so trapped in this perfect rectangular canvas,
one day I got drunk and I came home
and I saw this perfect rectangular shape of perpetrators,
and I got so upset I ripped everything.
I cut them with scissors and display everywhere.
And this one is actually a Champlain Collegey
installation piece.
And I made this a big cave like ink club
and invited viewers inside where I was.
This is kind of my last piece (indistinct) abstract piece.
This one is called chrysanthemum.
I drew chrysanthemum flower all over this paper
because in chrysanthemum, in Korea,
we use this flower in funerals to send people away.
So for me,
I realized after about four years of making
these abstract pieces,
I realized I gained myself back again.
I will never be the same person, and before I was raped,
but I gained my power through making art.
And chrysanthemum is also the flower that blooms
after like first cold, the first snow like mums.
So they go through this hard night obstacles in their life
and they don't compete with these beautiful summers, spring,
fall flowers.
They bloom at the late latest and they bloom beautifully.
And that's kind of how I saw myself,
went through turmoils in my life
but I was able to be more powerful than before.
After a while I started making this painting
called giant Asian girls.
I start with the replacing white female Disney characters
to Asian female characters.
Because like I said before,
I always felt like I did not belong here.
That I was alienated.
That I grew up with this Disney fairytales,
Christian Anderson and green brothers stories
read Richard scary stories in Korea growing up.
But when I came to America,
I realized that I might never be the main character here
that I thought I will be the Cinderella type of person
or the main character in Alice in Wonderland.
But the people around us did not see me like that.
I was just that little Asian girl, so that really upset me
and I replacing these Disney characters
in Western fairy tale characters with the Asian people.
This one is called Sleeping Beauty.
This one is again, Alice in Wonderland.
I also realized in America, Asian people,
Asian females are seen in a particular way.
This one is images from Mr. Saigon,
and this Asian woman,
being Mrs. Saigon and Madam Butterfly.
They are the Asian females who are weak and small,
and who's obedient, who are waiting for white male heroes.
And the stories are written by white male authors.
They are there to save us.
Like why would an Asian woman pick an Asian men
when we can pick a white men?
That's kind of what it is here.
She's always Madame Butterfly and Mrs Saigon,
they are prostitutes.
They sell their bodies, but there are also obedient,
they will wait for their lovers.
They will do everything they can do to be faithful,
but they can also fulfill White men
wildest sexual fantasies
After seeing Asian women like that
I realized my Asian woman in my paintings
kind of had that post of submissive,
they are always looking away,
they have this body language of not sure
of what they are looking for.
So as I start comparing them with how white women
were depicted in Western paintings as well,
like how light they were,
how light, they are lighter than like foam
and lighter than water,
how they are almost boneless and twisted body.
They always like allure men with this gazes,
how Aphelia,
is so beautiful in this water after she killed herself,
how sleeping woman, how sick woman,
how suicidal woman are idealizing the Western culture
and how Asian women are seen in Western culture as well.
They always compliment of how young we look,
how our hairs look so silky,
how our skin is pale enough
to fulfill the white people's desire.
But also we do not have these,
the white woman's strong personality.
We are culturally submissive.
We are culturally good mother and good wives.
Compare with that, the male portraits
are depicted very differently.
Like David's Napoleon and John Singer Sargent was built.
Theodore Roosevelt president,
they all like have their space.
They are owning their environment.
They're intelligent, they're powerful.
So I started using these poses on my guy and Asian girls.
First too, I used myself as a model because I didn't,
I was having hard time finding a picture of Asian woman,
having this confident poses.
Before I used a lot of magazine pictures,
but all this magazine pictures in a woman's world,
objectified and sexualized.
So I started using my self portrait.
This is the post from David's Napoleon and they are,
the backgrounds are the highest to Western culture.
They are Baroque and Renaissance and Gothic architectures.
This is how it started,
I take a picture of myself
and do a little sketch first layer of painting.
I collage the Paul Bunyan American lumberjack giant hero.
He is below my feet.
I am not trying to crush him.
So, you know, I am just aware that he's there.
I'm like, oh, you are there.
I heard you're a giant, but here you're very small.
I put soldiers and religious leaders below my feet,
and it is very satisfying and almost reversing
what I hear from other people in America,
how people are calling me when I'm walking with my daughter,
people are constantly asking me
if I'm a nanny to my own daughter.
I was thinking, why would white woman
holding hands with colored kids,
they assume these people adopted these kids
and Asian woman or colored mom,
when they're with white kids you assume we are nannies.
The children characters on kolaches are not about innocence
in both of the child,
who it is more about children's tantrum and ignorance,
stereotypical hate speech, ignorant comments,
how Asian woman should act.
So it's a depiction of a chaotic world around me.
And I got many volunteers who would like to be my (mumbles)
these women all went through hate speeches,
theory could be called judgment slashes.
And we've been asked, after the rise of Asian hate crime
these days after Donald Trump
constantly talking about Kung flu and Chinese virus,
I've been asked to when I was telling one of my friends
that I'm going to Asian markets,
she asked me if I am going to the market to buy bat meat,
something like that,
the people don't even think about they are hurting us,
it's a joke to them.
They talk about, they are dressed as in for Halloween,
they are dressed as a Chinese slut
and her boyfriend was a US military person.
That might be funny to them,
and then thinking they can share that with me,
but if you really think about it, it's really hurting us.
And this is my response to all these speeches,
and I have many volunteers who went through,
Asian people who got adapted to American culture,
who got adopted to American family,
who was born and raised here
constantly asked if they're international students.
When my mother was holding my daughter's hand the other day,
somebody asked her,
somebody said she was kidnapping my daughter,
all that kind of thing
that people think I've been asked a lot of interviews lately
after the rise of Asian hate crime,
but I wanted to say it's been there for the whole time
since first Asian people immigrated to America.
It has been there.
And then we are living with that discrimination
in our daily lives.
They are little larger than life sized.
So they are all sitting down.
Most of my (indistinct) Asian girls and scientists series
womans are sitting down.
So they are standing up, they are larger than life.
I also used the survivors of domestic violence
and sexual abuse for my models.
They are called the (indistinct)
I had a lot of UVM students
who wanted to be my models as well.
I was so happy to see yesterday,
all these UVM students gathered together
and doing a protest about speaking up about unfairness,
about how the school is dealing
with the student sex assault cases and sexual abuse cases.
It is not something that we should really hide under the rug
and not talk about it.
It's something we need to really bring it up.
The reason I am using local woman as a model
is because I want to tell everybody that these are us.
These are our sisters, our mother, these are our daughters.
These are not the people who you will only see in the movies
and a book that you read about, they are among us.
And they, I technology
and their power really inspired me
every time they come and volunteer to be my scientist,
they share their stories and they share their face
and their name, their actual name next to it
saying, this is me, I've been raped.
You can please share my story with others.
That requires enormous courage
because I understand I've been there.
I have been in that silence for very long time.
Sometimes it is just easier that way.
And in order to talk about it, it needs enormous courage.
And one of the professor, psychology professor in Korea
named Kyungil Kim.
He said, if you are in this situation
that you are stressed about,
if you want to run away, run away as fast as you can.
He says, run away using all your body
because your brain will understand
that you wanted get out of this situation.
The more you try, the more peaceful,
the faster you will be peaceful.
That's what I wanted to say.
Like, if you are stressed about an issue,
if you want to talk about rape cases,
if you want to talk about injustice do whatever you might,
you can do with your body,
like I was crawling on the floor for 300 hours
to fight with a perpetrator, make art, write something,
speak up, join the protest,
because you will eventually will give us a quick result
I believe, but he will also keep us peacefulness
in our mind.
And that was my last two slides,
I will send back to Andrea, thank you.
How do I, let me see.
- Oh wow.
As I'm gonna summarize some of the comments in the chat,
so powerful and brave and brilliant,
and I know we went a little over,
but I think we all could have listened to you all day.
I also want to acknowledge that hearing's traumatic stories
of trauma, we can feel that in our bodies and, you know,
I welcome you if you need to take a moment to stand,
stretch, breathe, to feel that,
check in with yourself.
It is 8:20.
We'd love folks to stay and chat
and ask their questions for a bit.
But we know you have some folks may need to leave,
feel free,
but since it is 8:20 AM
going to open it up to questions from everyone,
including the panelists for each other,
but including our audience.
And once again, you can put a question in the chat
and I'll read it for you,
or you can raise your hand or we're a small group,
so I think you could probably just unmute yourself and ask.
Yes, we have Jonathan.
- Let's see, can you hear me?
- Yes.
- Okay, awesome.
First I wanted to say hi to Misoo and Jen,
because I know them (laughs)
and I was very glad that I was able to be a part tonight.
And thank you for everyone sharing.
I'm gonna forget names, Nancy and Robin.
I had an idea of what question
I wanted to ask ahead of time
cause I teach a writing class that talks about,
investigates, free speech in the arts.
And as I was listening to everyone's talk,
I was sort of finding a connection
sort of between the mind and the body.
Cause when I think of free speech
and dilemmas of free speech,
that it usually sort of resides
at where the physical is, right?
When the speech translate into physical harm, right?
Which in some cases like with Charlottesville
or with hate crime is really tangible, right?
You can see the physical-ness of that.
And I was, the more I was thinking of each of your talks
that there isn't this clear line
between the physical and the mental
that the psychological and the mind
whether you're religious or not right
there's this blurry area between, and I guess,
so my question then is if you were to think about the limits
of where free speech should be,
would you place it at purely physical
waiting for that physical thing to happen
where someone is assaulted or someone is raped
or someone is killed,
or does it have to maybe be pulled back?
And we have to look at how is this actually,
how is free speech effecting us psychologically, mentally?
I don't know if that came across as well
as I had it in my head, but I'll leave it there.
And just whoever wants to take that, I'll just,
I'll leave it there.
I'll unmute myself and take my video away, so.
- I can maybe address a little bit of that
just from a spiritual standpoint,
when you are looking at the sort of the laws
that in Judaism govern speech,
we're really not supposed to speak ill of one another,
except for constructive purpose.
So, you know, that intuitively makes a lot of sense.
If the speech isn't constructive and going to help
uplift a person,
then we probably shouldn't be saying it.
And it's just really,
I guess we all have to sort of self monitor that,
I don't know that we can impose a blanket rule
over everything.
We can only sort of moderate ourselves and how we speak.
I had this, when I was doing this,
getting towards the end of the doing the seventh,
the end of the first seven pieces,
I had this epiphany, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
And really it was that our speech,
how we talk about and to one another
are the underpinnings of everything
that's wrong in the universe.
If we were just more careful
about how we spoke to and about each other,
I think that would go a long way to healing
a lot of the hatred and anger that's out there.
That is just, again,
coming from just a purely spiritual place
where someone has determined
some rules about speech and that in Judaism,
we aren't supposed to have any sort of negative speech
except for constructive purpose,
even by example of something as innocent
as two people meeting in the lunch room,
talking about a third person
and commiserating about the fact that the third person
didn't get the promotion.
That changes how you might look at that third person
ever so slightly
tiny, tiny, why didn't she get that promotion?
You know, is she not good enough changes or perception
ever, ever, ever so slightly without even realizing it?
Now you've got something against this person
who's perfectly nice, it just didn't get a job,
but she's tainted by some words, no fault of her own.
So it's, I think we should maybe
take a little bit of that to heart.
- Yeah, Robin here has 20 pieces in that series,
20 pieces by the time she got done with investigating
everything that Judaism had to teach about...
Teach us about hate speech.
And I learned a lot from her 20 pieces,
and it's easy a distinction to make physical harm
is just not the place to stop.
You really, the Jewish there,
her three murders one says
you murdered the souls of all three people,
the person talking, the person spoken to,
and this third person spoken about,
and actually the original,
in the original 10 commandments.
it's not thou shalt not kill it's though shalt not murder,
murder,
and murdering a person's soul
is considered at least as bad as murdering a person's body.
That also relates of course to what Misoo
was brave enough to put in her art
about killing the soul of the person.
It's not the physical damage is not the end of it,
it's the soul.
And that is what's crucial,
and what I was getting at in my paintings
is that we have to do a lot of self-examination
in order to be able to address these issues,
figure out where we stand and what we understand
and how we can teach our children
to not go repeating our mistakes.
It is something that every person in every generation,
in every spot you're in, fights,
if they have goodwill.
- So by way of just a very quick anecdote,
one of the other things that you're not supposed to do
when people are speaking Lashon Hara
is to stand there and listen to it.
And I got a phone call one Sunday morning from a girlfriend
who said, you're never gonna believe what happened.
And I'm like, okay, what happened?
She says, I was at a cocktail party on Saturday night
and I had just come in and I saw a group of women
whom I knew, and I got my drink,
and I went to this little group of women.
And the woman in the center was saying
some disparaging stuff about one of these other women
that were in the room, but not a part of the group.
She said, you know what I did?
I said, no, what did you do?
She said, I turned around and I left.
And she said, do you know what happened?
I said, no, what happened?
She said this morning, I got a phone call
from the woman who was gossiping
and saying unkind things about the woman
in the cocktail party apologizing to me.
If I had offended her with my speech,
I said, oh, (clapping) good for you.
So there are things that we can do
that are silent and proactive and not tolerated
without even having to utter words to people to fight back.
And I love that when she called and she told me that
I was like, yes.
- Thank you for bringing this up.
- Yes.
- Nancy and Robin, can I say something?
- Sure. - Yes.
- I think it's really inspiring what you were saying
about not saying bad thing about others.
I think it is all everybody knows about it.
Like what we should do
that we've been taught not to do that,
but sometimes it's very difficult.
I still gossip with my friends.
Like when I'm in the restaurant with my Korean friends
and we are like,
we can gossip loudly about the people next to us
because they would not understand us.
(laughing)
I almost think like it's just human nature to gossip.
And then I remember that the book Sapiens,
I don't know if you guys read about it, it's by the author,
Yuval Harari.
He mentioned that one of the things
that human is different than animal
is we gossip and that helped the human
build the civilization.
That was he's saying, which when I was reading them,
I'm like, oh, this is very interesting.
That he said like, by gossiping,
by telling each other who is dangerous,
who you should not talk to
that make us like our group or your group,
and you also like separate our group as well.
And then what can we just refreshing,
like after reading that book,
hearing from you and Robin
about a totally different point of view of a gossiping,
I wonder what you are thinking about that logic,
that gossip is important in human nature.
- Yeah, I'm also a biologist
and I especially liked studying things like this
when I was a lot younger.
And I do think that you have one can recognize
the importance of this sort of thing in human nature.
And in fact, there are many other things
that are important in human nature.
That can be issues when you want to develop
into a better human being.
When you have a world that's different
from a tribal situation where we were hunter gatherers,
and we had to be aware of everybody around us.
Now it crops up as an important defect because
just because it was important in the beginning,
doesn't mean it's important now for us to continue that.
I think we have to recognize where to draw the line,
and that's one of the reasons why I loved Robin's 20 pieces,
because it helped me learn where the line should be drawn.
The rabbis had thought about this
for centuries and centuries and written about it.
And to have that carefully considered thought
to me is an elevation.
I mean, I value my animal instincts still,
but there's a place to not have the same ones.
- I was thinking of the same thing Misoo
and it sounds glad you asked that.
And I appreciate Nancy's answer.
We have a question from Mave in the audience.
- Thanks so much.
So I'm Mave Eveha, I'm a linguist actually.
So all this talk about language is just really fascinating.
And I've been working on some of the work that I do
is a critical analysis of like newspaper reporting
of particular events.
I'm working right now on the Atlanta spot shootings.
And the way that sort of, that, you know,
racialized misogyny was reported on in the press
and how that compares to some other instances.
But I'm interested in particular if I wrote it down
and I can't remember even who said it,
and I'm sorry, but someone said,
I think, well, the slippage between cause and consequence
begins with language.
And I just wondered if you could talk
a little bit more about that, it was really intriguing.
And I just wanna say also that this felt
everybody's talks today
just felt really powerful and restorative to me,
and I really needed this today, and I appreciate all of it.
Thank you so much.
- You're muted.
- You're good.
- Oh, we're good now, oh, wonderful.
I thought that Tabor was here, maybe she had to log off
because she would have been the perfect person
to talk about that.
I can read you what she additionally wrote,
which I didn't get to share because of time.
But she said the layers of know
have been struck with a hammer of a typewriter circa 1940,
which elicits an energy of action,
not available in the silent type of a computer.
There then digitally enlarged
and his red lines get mingled with black type
of course of refusal seeks an alertness
in a real consequential time.
And I don't know what I can add to that.
I hope it went a little bit of a way
to answer your question.
- Maybe someone else has an observation.
- Maybe someone else has an observation and they can share.
- No, Jen, Lisa, (indistinct)
- I'm sorry.
I didn't understand the question.
- I think there was this idea of language
being this maybe catalyst and I think sort of comparing
both comments either positively or negatively
that language can conspicuous towards hate
or can be that know that that stops hate
if it stops it soon enough.
Oh, Jen's unmuting.
(chuckles)
It's very slow.
- Does that work?
- Yeah.
- Sorry, the chat comes up right over the buttons.
So I had to wait for the chat to go away.
I guess I just wanted to address it maybe
for more of a preventative,
because it's something I think about as a teacher.
And I think about, you know, especially with young folks,
like, and I'm also learning,
I think we're all learning ways of applying language
to identities and to the world that are affirmative,
that are respectful, that are inclusive.
And so I really think about ways of calling in
those different types of languages
when I'm doing workshops, when I'm teaching classes
and really, and also explaining
why those things are important,
why the shift in language is important,
especially if there's somebody in the room
who has that identity,
whether or not we realize that that like basically
we're trying to do harm prevention.
And so all these things, right.
And again,
it's so much about is understanding and connecting.
I really do believe that the more we can do that,
like we are less able to hurt others
when we can respect other people.
So as far as that, that slippage,
I do think that there's a preventative
in the way that we think about language and ask questions
and try to have that open dialogue
around how we understand our language impacting others.
- I often think about obviously PC,
whatever gets demonized so much,
but I think it's really, I think it's exactly,
it's just another way of framing what you're saying, Jen,
which is how we learn to evolve our language,
to reduce harm,
including understanding what is and is not acceptable.
- Am I unmuted?
- Yes.
- Okay, I think, yeah,
and I think it's funny, you said the PC thing, right.
That's got such a bad rap.
And I think that for me, when I think about the idea of PC,
I think it's more about like how we do it also, right,
instead of like policing people and slapping people
on the wrist is really just about affirming identities
and using it from that perspective.
And I think that that I don't like that
I understand where the whole PC thing comes from,
even though I don't like it.
So I think that there's more to it,
but I think that that really can turn people off
and break down this conversation.
- Right, I'm like, oh, go ahead.
- I started doing pretend play with my daughter.
You know, a lot of people don't experience that.
I been talking with my daughter,
like teach her here about Asian hate speeches
or discrimination at school.
And she's like, no, I happen,
and then, and I'm like, well, you will be in the situation,
and then we need to prepare for that.
So I wrote like a little goals
and then while we were doing like,
pretend evenly, like raccoon family, bunny family,
and then squirrel family does not like raccoons family.
And then we were doing like hate speech
and then like not, just practice not to be a bystander
and then get into that.
I think that like practicing that really helped us
because when we are actually
in that hate speech environment sometimes,
it's really hard to just jump in
if you are not prepared for it.
So I started doing that, I think it's really helping.
- That's amazing and a great idea for all parents
or people who interact with children or anyone.
Erica, you wanted to jump in here.
- Thank you.
These are really wonderful and powerful as everyone said.
And to me that the thing thought
that just kind of popped into my head
was that the other side of speech is listening.
And like I've been teaching in my course
of comparative religions
and we do a unit on native American culture and religion.
And in the writing that I've read
by native American teachers,
they're much more concerned with listening than speaking,
in fact.
So there's, and I think that
it occurs to me as a person who, you know, is part,
identify as part of the dominant culture in so many ways
that it's even more important to let others speak.
And so in this question of free speech
and who's allowed to decide who gets to speak
and that I feel like it's important
to have that kind of self awareness or self control
like Robin was talking about in some situations,
but then have this kind of boldness to speak
like Misoo was saying just now as well in that situation.
And it's so contextual to decide, you know, where am I now?
Who am I speaking to?
Who am I speaking over?
And what is my speech going to accomplish?
But I also feel like your art is speech as well.
And I am extremely grateful for all of it.
I wish I had known about that wooden quilt
so I could have come and participated, looked amazing.
- I'm looking for,
it'll be up hopefully permanently in the south end
at some point, and I'll post it on public social media.
And that happens.
We'll definitely be up for the Art Hop
hopefully before then.
- Unless there are any other questions
I might call it there,
but what ending on a high note,
I feel like this is such an amazing event.
Every single presentation was amazing
and our conversation was amazing.
And I just feel really blessed to be here with all of you
to hear about your amazing work
and to engage in this dialogue with all of you,
including our audience.
If there are any final thoughts, I'll invite them now.
- I just wanna say how a great plan
for pulling this together,
how there's so many different things happening here,
and the consequences of hate speech is like the,
it's so important, right?
And it's a thing we're able to talk about
and how many different ways we're able to address it
through language and through art.
And for curating this, Erica,
I'm really grateful for that.
- Yeah, I just want to say once again
how wonderful this is too,
COVID has brought the fact that we can do these meetings
and that I can meet all of you from across the country,
Robin and I can know you and which we otherwise wouldn't,
even though I have very close personal ties
to Burlington, Vermont,
I never would have met any of you any other way.
So thank you, and for I'm going to be watching you now,
I'm going to have to be picking up your work.
And following you.
- Great fans.
- Thank you.
- I guess I was gonna ask,
if you had mentioned there's part four,
are there ways artists should know
about ways to submit work?
- Oh, yes, the application is on our website,
Vector Artists Initiative.
- Vector Artist Initiative.
Singular, artistinitiative.mcom.
- I believe Erika has one has a mailing too.
- Yeah, we have a flyer.
- Yeah, but you can go directly to our website
if you can't find that, you probably can find Erica.
- Yeah, find Erica.
- Yeah.
- And the link is further up in the chat.
I'll try to repost it at the bottom, right?
- Yeah, we'd love to hear from any of you.
- Any of you that would like to submit
it's open to everyone,
all professional artists and it's free submission,
there's no fees for submitting.
We want as many voices,
varied voices as we possibly can in the conversation.
- The deadline?
- The deadline is June 1st.
So we give enough time for people to create new work
or to go through the work that already existed
and find some great stuff and submit.
- Okay, all righty.
- I would probably say one more thing,
which I should have said at the beginning,
but also to thank Eugene Culkin.
He generously donated money to the Jewish studies program
that supported this program
and has supported other programs in the past.
So he is our angel benefactor
and made a lot of this possible.
So I'm very grateful to him.
- All right, thank you everyone.
- Bye you guys.
- Great to meet you all (mumbles) together.