1 00:00:18,580 --> 00:00:21,500 I should've prepared for you guys more. 2 00:00:22,360 --> 00:00:23,860 Things are a little unruly. 3 00:00:25,240 --> 00:00:26,220 --Yeah, right on the... 4 00:00:26,220 --> 00:00:28,060 --In the same line, right here. 5 00:00:28,280 --> 00:00:31,249 I have this keen interest in 6 00:00:31,249 --> 00:00:35,350 not just autonomous, singular objects, 7 00:00:35,350 --> 00:00:37,400 but whole collections of things. 8 00:00:39,660 --> 00:00:42,680 Part of the reason I think I'm attracted to collections 9 00:00:42,680 --> 00:00:45,839 is because they constitute one person's-- 10 00:00:45,839 --> 00:00:47,159 or one institution's-- 11 00:00:47,159 --> 00:00:49,030 way of seeing the world. 12 00:00:49,030 --> 00:00:52,149 And it's like this little time capsule 13 00:00:52,149 --> 00:00:53,989 of things that were important to someone. 14 00:00:53,989 --> 00:00:56,430 And so, I spend a lot of time 15 00:00:56,430 --> 00:01:00,960 looking for the personality of people within their collections. 16 00:01:00,960 --> 00:01:04,059 And then maybe even trying to tease out, in a collection, 17 00:01:04,060 --> 00:01:05,960 why those things are important. 18 00:01:09,620 --> 00:01:13,120 So the first collection that I received is Prairie Avenue Bookstore, 19 00:01:13,120 --> 00:01:16,240 which was a architectural history bookstore 20 00:01:16,240 --> 00:01:18,020 in Downtown Chicago. 21 00:01:18,500 --> 00:01:22,460 The second collection I purchased was Dr. Wax. 22 00:01:23,400 --> 00:01:25,500 It was a record store in Hyde Park, 23 00:01:25,500 --> 00:01:27,940 which is a neighborhood on the South Side. 24 00:01:28,720 --> 00:01:30,280 I don't know how many albums... 25 00:01:31,040 --> 00:01:32,039 Six thousand. 26 00:01:32,039 --> 00:01:33,039 Eight thousand. 27 00:01:33,040 --> 00:01:34,040 A lot of albums. 28 00:01:34,100 --> 00:01:38,440 And the third collection was the University of Chicago's glass lantern slides. 29 00:01:38,900 --> 00:01:42,659 I'm using the glass slides to teach art history sometimes. 30 00:01:42,659 --> 00:01:45,590 Sometimes I include them as part of works of art, 31 00:01:45,590 --> 00:01:47,649 or they become the works of art themselves-- 32 00:01:47,649 --> 00:01:50,200 in the case of the Jet magazines. 33 00:01:51,680 --> 00:01:57,020 I've taken an amazing canon of Johnson Publishing magazines. 34 00:01:57,020 --> 00:01:58,900 This is Jet magazine. 35 00:02:00,100 --> 00:02:03,960 We had about twelve thousand unbound periodicals. 36 00:02:06,680 --> 00:02:11,140 I had been binding them and color coding them by decade. 37 00:02:12,520 --> 00:02:14,140 It's exciting, this body of work, 38 00:02:14,140 --> 00:02:18,580 because it gets to ask questions about monochrome painting. 39 00:02:19,590 --> 00:02:21,900 When they're functioning as a monochrome painting, 40 00:02:21,900 --> 00:02:25,110 they're not necessarily functioning like an archive. 41 00:02:25,400 --> 00:02:27,840 But, in fact, my hope is that 42 00:02:27,840 --> 00:02:31,400 the history and the content that's loaded inside the books 43 00:02:31,400 --> 00:02:34,480 will be waiting for people to unearth it. 44 00:02:36,940 --> 00:02:40,660 As the magazine, it was making the work of the present. 45 00:02:40,660 --> 00:02:42,980 It wasn't attempting to make an archive. 46 00:02:43,440 --> 00:02:48,080 But it's so amazing that these bound volumes constitute the 1990s. 47 00:02:48,520 --> 00:02:52,960 And it's a very particular 1990s Black-American experience. 48 00:02:52,969 --> 00:02:57,920 And I feel really fortunate to have been able to bind these things 49 00:02:57,920 --> 00:03:00,640 and then to make them present in the world again. 50 00:03:06,100 --> 00:03:10,440 Right now, we're working on archiving this hardware store. 51 00:03:10,840 --> 00:03:13,900 The hardware store was, again, kind of like Dr. Wax. 52 00:03:14,740 --> 00:03:18,099 This amazing guy, Ken, had owned it for thirty years 53 00:03:18,100 --> 00:03:19,900 and he was retiring. 54 00:03:20,909 --> 00:03:21,900 We loved his building, 55 00:03:21,909 --> 00:03:23,130 but we loved the stuff. 56 00:03:23,130 --> 00:03:26,480 And so, we bought the entire hardware store. 57 00:03:30,360 --> 00:03:32,040 In changing neighborhoods, 58 00:03:32,040 --> 00:03:33,340 poor neighborhoods, 59 00:03:33,360 --> 00:03:36,720 neighborhoods where a big box like Home Depot might move in, 60 00:03:36,720 --> 00:03:40,240 what do you do with Ken's legacy? 61 00:03:41,109 --> 00:03:43,320 How do you catalog the everyday, 62 00:03:43,330 --> 00:03:46,310 especially as the phenomena of the everyday is changing? 63 00:03:46,310 --> 00:03:51,060 And is this another way of tracking Black space? 64 00:03:52,460 --> 00:03:56,280 Black, not necessarily just about Black people, 65 00:03:56,280 --> 00:03:58,100 but about forgotten people. 66 00:03:58,510 --> 00:04:03,080 It's a space where things have stopped growing. 67 00:04:03,080 --> 00:04:06,800 And then maybe it's also, like, the void. 68 00:04:08,280 --> 00:04:10,400 Like, resources go in, 69 00:04:10,400 --> 00:04:12,680 and you're not sure where they go. 70 00:04:13,200 --> 00:04:13,960 Black space. 71 00:04:14,340 --> 00:04:14,840 Like... 72 00:04:16,380 --> 00:04:17,660 Galactic space. 73 00:04:20,580 --> 00:04:22,400 These are the things that I'm working with. 74 00:04:23,500 --> 00:04:26,130 I'm having a lot of fun looking at these objects 75 00:04:26,130 --> 00:04:28,190 both as sculptural objects 76 00:04:28,190 --> 00:04:32,290 and as objects that have the potential to create new sculptural works. 77 00:04:32,290 --> 00:04:33,360 It's the thing, 78 00:04:33,360 --> 00:04:34,940 and it's the thing that makes the thing.