uh thank you catherine and uh welcome to our latest conversation this
is a series of conversations on the arts and humanities and libraries and
museums uh we've already had a conversation with
andrew roberts for uh from the national churchill
museum on the 75th anniversary of the iron curtain speech and
the great film critic uh david thompson uh and upcoming
uh conversations will be with lonnie bunch the director of the smithsonian
francine pros the great novelist uh john palfrey of the macarthur foundation
julian zuguz zagoidia the director of the
nelson museum in kansas city carol anderson
robert putnam and marianne wolff uh it should be a a great a great lineup but
we have a star with us today jane chu who is
uh i think he was the 11th uh chair of the national endowment for the
for the arts uh long time friend um fellow kansas
city and and i want to start jane uh by asking a
crucial question who is jane choo you you have
you have this remarkable background and i've i've heard you
uh before and watched to watch some of your interviews uh talking about
uh your parents and their journey uh to the united states and where you grew
up what to tell us a little bit about your parents
and uh and their journey to the united states
oh well first of all thank you so much for letting me join you
um if i had to characterize my life it really would be
sort of a jux juxtaposition of two different orbits that don't usually
uh seem like they would interact with each other
but yes my parents were both from china though they met in chicago
and i was born in oklahoma and grew up in arkansas so
uh philadelphia arkansas what a great name
it was named it's about a town of um ten thousand
but it's got two universities and i think it was named after
similar to philadelphia would be the arc of brotherly love
and and the university which is very important in your childhood and
and through on through college what what she did is that
did i pronounce it correctly washita anyway sorry washington
and so my father was a an economics professor there
where i grew up and uh it really was about
my life being a combination of bok choy and corn dog
and so i i love bok choy and and corn dogs bok choy at home and
corn dogs uh in in in school with your friends
no doubt and and and speaking chinese at home
and and my parents i regret that my parents
uh that i wasn't speaking to them actively in chinese because they really
wanted me to assimilate and and when i was growing up nobody was
chinese in arkansas it really felt like i don't
think even they were chinese restaurants so it really was
assimilating but certainly i heard chinese and
uh now regret it but i'm taking lessons again
which is interesting and i'll be interested to talk to you a little bit
later on when we look at some of your own
art um i want to talk to you about about about your immersion
in in chinese language and and culture i and you you're one of the few if not
the only uh uh chinese uh family
and you're of course born in oklahoma so you're a chinese-american but
um uh college and in arkadelphia i assume so
that must have been um alienating or uh
concerning in in any way growing up uh or
were was it easy to make friends i had a lot of friends
and so but i didn't uh see myself in anybody i uh interacted with
and so it really was a combination of it really wasn't until i was an adult
and i visited other cities including washington dc that i saw a more
international flavor by just looking around and i do
remember the first time i saw many a whole group of
chinese uh and almost i almost fainted because i had not
uh grown up by seeing anybody else who looked like me other
than my mom and dad and and your father died when you were
very young uh and and so he was uh
he was uh ill and uh with cancer and then died when i was nine and you
talked about how that your introduction to the arts in a way
at that point the piano was very important uh to you that it was
something you were able to use in uh in those
terrible circumstances it really was uh one of the ways that i have
uh learned the importance of the arts because my parents
spoke another language that was native to them
and i spoke english at a nine-year-old i didn't have enough words for
vocabulary to express my own grief of the loss of my parent and maybe
many nine-year-olds don't but i really didn't because
my parents spoke chinese and i spoke english so
i found out that those piano lessons that i was being forced to take
at eight and nine and i was drawing lessons
they were a vocabulary for me and that i could actually
uh have the arts as a way of expressing myself
way beyond just everyday conversational linear everyday use of words
i could i could feel like i was more holistically
uh expressing myself through my vocabulary
of the arts so i saw a very important uh link of how arts can do that for
people i it seems to me and i think we'll talk
a little bit more about this as we get to the future of uh libraries and
museums in the future of the arts and humanities that the arts really are
a language and and a language that can be a language of self-development uh
for for people coming from many uh or any uh background uh but but i do
wanna i wanna ask you another couple of questions about
about your childhood because i think this is interesting and
uh and important your mother took a job at wachita
uh uh college uh and you lived in a dorm where she was sort of the dorm
mom you know known as mom chew um but you showed your entrepreneurial
instincts which i think defines you uh tell us the the story about how you
made some money uh off uh off mom chew and her position
uh oh i'm trying to think back about ways i've done that
you got a nickel if i just the story i've heard that you've told before is
that you you you've charged a nickel for
oh well one one of the things and uh i probably did that i have
no doubt that i probably did that but one of them your mother did inspections
of the of the dorm right and then i turned around and charged a nickel too
you charged a nickel to let people know in advance that she was coming around
well i would not put that past me yeah and i see having known you as the ceo of
the co the kauffman center for the performing
arts and is the chair of the national endowment
i recognize that entrepreneurial uh instinct
talking about the way i would i had a ready audience by being able to go
around and sell girl scout cookies to every room so that was another option
there you go exactly my point and and and i do and i do want to reveal this
because it's it's another form of art you know it's a style art art and style
um that you uh you went to college at wachita too and graduated from wichita
um and uh you were the homecoming queen
this is on the website i found this on the website of washington where they
have they do they have a big a big section of the website of washi talk
colleges about you and you were the homecoming queen
so i just want everyone to know that we have the homecoming queen we watch utah
college here um so i'm going to skip over an another
major part of your uh uh your resume your history which is the many degrees
of many uh uh degrees in in the arts and
professions your mbas and phds and whatnot we're just it's a given that
you have these not to mention honorary degrees as well
which are also earned degrees in their in their in their own way
but you became the uh eventually the the ceo
of the kauffman center for the performing arts in kansas city
this is a really important moment in kansas city's cultural history maybe
in many ways maybe the most important moment in kansas city's
cultural history and um is it an extraordinary uh uplifting of
the spirit of of the city and and you were involved in that
but one of the things i want you to talk a little bit about because it's
something that um that i relate to in a very personal
way my mother uh was the founder of the original
performing arts foundation in kansas city and
brought evelyn lehrer in to do handles julius caesar and his celebration of
virgil thompson and whatnot and so i like to think that it's you and
the performing arts center are sort of her millennial descendants
but also we what i really want you to talk
about though is the importance of women as as the creators of this cultural
moment in kansas city so it's you as the ceo of the kauffman center julia
irene kaufman who organized as a tribute to her mother and
her mother's interest in in the arts the funding and the
organization of this uh adele hall hallmark cards uh family
uh and and shirley helzberg who you and i were talking about earlier a friend
um who really uh four women you four women got together and and did
this over uh objections and resistance from
the civic community that was really pretty substantial the
one must say nearly all male nearly all white male
uh civic institution tell us a little bit about how that happened in your view
of women in the arts well i was really proud to be part of
that wonderful project and i there were so many people as you have
named and uh so many women leaders i'd also throw
in jan kramer from the greater foundation but all of
them have played significant roles in creating an
environment where the arts can thrive the arts and
the humanities and so i came on board when there was
ground breaking so i had hard hat hair for five years
before we opened but the ways that all of the people that you've
named contributed to creating that environment they just
they just stood in there and even if there was
some hesitancy of other people wondering if there should even be a
performing arts center this really is something that
muriel kaufman really wanted and so julia
irene kaufman gets the credit for sticking to
her resolve to have this but i was i remember a decade earlier
long before i ever thought i would be the ceo
of the kauffman center i remember reading the market surveys about
how they wanted to plan for this and so all along the way you can see various
phases of how these women contributed to
making it from a dream which was really a drawing on a napkin
all the way to opening in 2011 and it's thriving
and and you know julia irene and you had a devotion to excellence so she she
got mosha softy you got mosha softy to to be the the
architect and it's a stunning design you know what one of the things that's
interesting and that is a tribute to the to the the importance of the arts and
we'll talk a little bit about the arts and the pandemic and post pandemic in a
minute but we keep building these great
monuments to to to the arts this has happened in the
library world as well where we built these great
we're renovating these great central libraries we're building these
performing arts centers the great halls get somebody like moshe soft to design a
signature building and it's almost like these have become
the cathedrals of our our civil religion uh if you will
and sometimes people um in addition to maybe us a cathedral or a
some kind of a monument i know one of the things
julia kaufman wanted is for this building to be
uh so accessible and so comfortable to all walks of life and so that was
the mantra that we followed and so if you think of
a venue like that as being a place for the community
i don't necessarily mean that it is a community center but i do mean
how do you make sure that people from all walks of life
uh feel like they belong in there and there's multiple ways to do it but it
really had to be that way and i think this is one of the best opportunities
for the arts and the humanities museums libraries
to be that place where someone can say uh similar to the author is it ray
oldenburg who wrote that book about the third place where if your
first place my home and your second place might be work where's that third
place where you feel like you belong uh the arts and the humanities have an
opportunity to create those places where all can feel like they
belong each in their own ways right our our friend our mutual friend
julian zugos agueria got lonnie bunch in a conversation a couple of nights ago
uh that i was able to watch and uh and and he this is sort of a theme of their
conversation uh julian asked this question of lonnie
are our art centers museums in particular
are are they uh community centers and lonnie said
no they're not community centers but they should be
centers of the community and it's essentially what you you just said
it's something where everybody's welcome it's it's a it's a place where
people gather from all parts of the community uh
and it's and i think in the case of the kauffman center which is such a good
example of this because softie's design is wonderful it's really
open to the communities wonderful views of
uh the downtown the crossroads and uh you see a lot of kansas city union
station and liberty memorial the world war one
museum etc um and uh it uh it is a focus it's
something to be proud of i mean even if you don't go to the opera
or the ballet or the symphony it's something you'd be proud of for
your city and then what you did for the opera of
the ballet and the symphony raised all of them up i can remember the
new york times reviews of the first performances
which you know bro put kansas city on a cultural
map and and and lifted the aspirations i think
uh of of of all those and of course speak with some
uh prejudice about the opera my wife being the director of the opera but
the general director of the opera but i think they've all reached
an extraordinary level and it's had something to do with the aspiration that
you put into it it also has something to do with
something that i have learned just from my bok choy corn dog lifestyle
and that is
it's not a time to uh force fit everybody to have to like the same thing
this is a night this is a time to celebrate
different identities uh different life different uh perspectives and i
learned a lot of uh practical steps even at the
kauffman center for the performing arts on how do you embrace uh because you
know on the if i put my business hat on i might say
something like let's figure out the one program
that everybody will like and that's just not
uh realistic people like different things it's like different restaurants
people like different kinds of food but if you can find uh a menu of
options uh that reaches out to um a different set of perspectives and
honor the different ways of the different
likes and the different dislikes and the different identities uh
perspectives uh that's the way a venue like that can
uh be there for the community well and and so that that leads me to to my next
question and and the the goblin center's a good
example of that what you did at the nea i think uh
is also uh important in this regard and and so your
your views are uh are important to me on this subject
uh the the former secretary of state our last secretary of state before our
current secretary of state uh on exiting uh the state department
said we are not a multicultural nation and i sort of
fell out out of my chair um uh you know thinking thinking about how i
grew up in kansas city which you know is probably not the most
multicultural place in america or the world uh but where i grew up with
the nelson and you know the great chinese collection
and the chinese exhibit and the great native american
uh uh collection and the great native american exhibit sacred circles that
that they did and um and and and then you know what you've done it
at the at the center for the performing arts but are
are we a multicultural nation or are we not a multicultural nation
there is a wonderful article that uh harvard
sociologist nathan glaser wrote a few years before he passed
and um the subheading was intriguing but pretty much said are
we a melting pot in america or are we a
nation of nations and when i grew up as a little kid
melting pot was a common term used because it did record it represented
say all the ingredients that go into a stew and a lot of the ingredients
will be different from each other but right now we are a nation of nations
and having grown up again in my bok choy corn dog lifestyle it is totally
possible to have both one perspective and the
other uh it doesn't have to be either this
versus that it can be both this and that and i find
that in my own uh creativity and i certainly see that
in the creation and the arts and the humanities that
when you create for at least a moment you have to
suspend uh your uh judgment on what
how things are supposed to be and venture into that world of
uh ambiguity and venture into the world of um
of where you suspend your judgment and you say how do i create
i just i've just been given a blank canvas and it's totally possible
to have both this and that as opposed to you win
and i lose or vice versa so i would say nations yeah you've used that phrase
before that that i win doesn't me have to mean you
lose maybe we both win which i think is a a a great thing
there's a a a larger cultural language that we all
almost all of us speak at some time or another but we need to maybe learn to to
speak it more often which which is about curiosity among other
things that it's about imagination um and and we should be interested it seems
to me in in the various communities that go up
you call them nations and i think that's uh that that's true uh i i think of them
as the communities within the community that go to make up the larger community
and i want to know about you know when i became a librarian in kansas city i
found out we had we had a a reasonably significant
filipino community in kansas city we had the
second largest croatian american community in the united states
neither of which i knew before i became a librarian and which i thought was
wonderful we should celebrate uh and and and we and we did and they
had fun the individual communities the rest of the
community had fun finding out about this you know getting the provitits of bread
or uh learning about the the philippine the philippines
relationship to the united states over the last 150 years
um you know i think it's a uh it seems to me a great thing
and it and it enriches us to be a multi multicultural nation
yes and one of the reasons i think that uh there's never been a better time
for the arts and the humanities to be able to be those
uh centers in the community is because we already live that suspension of
judgment when we're creating we already know what it's like to get
very energized by having somebody give us a blank canvas
when uh other people are saying this has never been done before so we don't know
what to do uh we don't typically uh we're in an
environment where we don't get stuck at that kind of thing so
instead of feeling like there's any kind of a scarcity well i don't want
to give you that because i'll lose this uh it's the opposite more is more is
better and more begets more because when you create you start
expanding your imagination and you start dreaming
and then you can turn it into reality and and so when when you became the
chair of the of the nea obviously this is a a kind of
thing that you needed to be thinking about
it's kind of thing i think about every day
uh the diversity of the country the multicultural nature of the country
and some people whose stories have been left out
uh of our story and you know as a chinese american
to immigrant parents you know something about that that
the chinese and the the the the japanese american stories which are very
important stories going back to the 19th century
um and and before but certainly the 19th century
haven't been well told until very recently when we were starting to
to uh to hear about them and you know can the nea the neh the imls can we play
a role in in telling those stories and making
them part of the larger story absolutely and uh you already are uh
asking the right questions how do we tell
the stories and stories is at the heart of stories is a really
a wonderful avenue to highlight all the different
perspectives all the different identities and all the different ways to
belong and another way is it's just a very
simple uh one relationship at a time i learned
that when i was at the nea and we traveled to
all the states uh and uh we could see that uh
the arts in this particular that in that particular case in one state
would be different from the arts in another state and so if i had come in
expecting every state to handle and express themselves through
the arts in a certain way uh and i wouldn't
it just wouldn't have worked because that isn't the way
uh it everybody was able to honor uh the arts in each state each in their
own ways and yet everyone was dedicated to making sure that the arts could
thrive each in their own ways that's really uh very key to not
feel like we would have to go to scale and have everybody
force fit into the same mold it is not at all
uh threatening to celebrate the different types of
uh ways of expressing ourselves and creating uh
in fact it's a it's uh both and and uh you can have it all
when it comes to the arts and humanities well i feel that you know in in missouri
we can claim pretty much to be the uh the center
of culture in the world because we we have uh you know of course mark twain
and tsley perhaps our two to greatest poet and greatest writer
generally we have langston hughes uh and aaron douglas who sort of you
know between the two of them they created the harlem renaissance
uh black elk speaks was actually written by john neihart
and at the university of missouri um i i can go i can go on with this
but i was thinking recently i was thinking of a story that relates to
missouri and you might know what one of the two people um guillobad
do you know at all he's the o and h okay um
the great architect um well his father churra obada who was intern during the
second world war was a japanese immigrant in 1903
taught at berkeley from 1933 to 1954 but was interned during the war and and
and gil went to washington university to prevent from
being interned became a a great architect
and recently churro obama's painting he's a wonderful painter uh was shown at
the smithsonian the museum of american art um was the last
exhibit before the pandemic actually and i was thinking about it
guillot designed this air and space museum of the smithsonian
and i was the and you know there is no more american museum
than the the air and space museum and his father who does
these wonderful delicate sort of combinations of
modernist 20s and 30s painting influenced by
by various american and european artists but also
very much related to his japanese heritage these elegant uh
paintings of uh yosemite and the sierra nevadas
that you know could be a 19th century japanese print and i'm thinking the
juxtaposition of of churro obama's beautiful paintings in the air and space
museum a few blocks away uh created by a you know now missouri
native geo obada i thought i thought was a
tremendous example of our multicultural heritage
which is also a very american story in a very american heritage
very much so and your ability to point that out is a very important thing
that's how we will tell those stories yeah yeah yeah so at the na you sort of
mentioned this that uh uh in passing but i think you know i
want to highlight it one of you a signature accomplishment is
you you hit all 50 states um very very few
federal bureaucrats can do what you you did i
know now as being a similar federal bureaucrat of
course i have the pandemic which is a little bit of a
an anchor uh on on travel but um you visited 400 sites is that right
i did now i you know i'm sitting here regretting that i did not get to go to
some of these jurisdictions i so wanted to go to
puerto rico and guam and a few other places but i did hit the
states and uh traveled from one place to the other i'm
pretty confident i know i've been to every major airport and know where all
the vegan sandwiches are since i eat vegan but no it it really was
fly away from one state and fly to the next
and make sure that mindset i was ready to embrace
what i was going to be engaged in going forward
as opposed to trying to compare one state
to the previous state well i think i think it's a very impressive thing if
a federal agency and and and you're making
choices the way the nea the neh and the imls
are are required to do it's what we do we make grants based on
on quality on standards some standards set by congress or the administration
various external uh things uh and to try and be
fair to to to the 330 or 40 million uh american taxpayers and citizens
uh it's very very difficult and the effort that you made i think is
is really pretty extraordinary um yeah yeah
so some some of your your other accomplishments i mean you had some
signature programs the create creativity connects uh program
creativity has been a very important word to you
creative force talk about that a little bit uh well the creativity connects
really stemmed from the fact that we were recognizing that are
noticing that um many people were going through a
transition in the arts and especially because of
the presence of the internet where uh arts different disciplines and
categories would be separate from each other and we're all
starting to have a giant mashup and the same say musicians in one area
might also be doing gigs in another area that seemed like they didn't match up
or sometimes museums would have some type of an exhibition that included
a music portion and it wasn't just a
musical accompaniment to the visual arts it was the type of
integrated exhibition where if someone took
extracted the musical part the whole exhibition would
go away so this giant mashup was coming together and that creativity connects
was a celebration of how we all work together
how we come together in a mashup so we gave a few grants out
related to those who were innovating by bringing arts together either with
other arts or maybe it was arts and science and
maybe it was other things like that in terms of
creative forces that was a recognition of how the arts
played such a key role in our service members who were affected by
combat induced psychological health conditions
tbi pts and the medical professionals were saying
that when arts therapy from visual arts to music and dance and
all kinds of other ways it seemed like our service members who were affected
with those conditions seem to be able to manage their pain
more uh relationships started getting better again with their families
and so the creative forces program is about expanding
to reach all of our veterans as well as military service members who had
uh undergone such uh trauma so so we we hear about the healing arts
but really the arts themselves have become
uh to to a significant stent about healing and i wonder what your feeling
is we've gone through a period where the racial protests last year and of course
they continue uh but the significance is a kind of
racial turning point in american history that and which
which now includes uh asian pacific uh uh members of our community
uh with the outbreak of some violence there
um and and talk a little bit about the the uh the place of the arts in the the
in the in the various uh divides that we have in the country
the racial divides the political divides the economic divides
can can the arts play a a healing role well they absolutely can
um i think uh of a an old fable and i don't know who created this story
uh a long time ago but if you ever find out i'd love to attribute it to
whomever but the uh there's this story about
how somebody's walking alongside the riverbank
and they turn and look at the river and there's a body
floating down the river so the person jumps in the river
and pulls the body out and saves that person
and so the per the person walks continues to walk along the riverbank
and notices another body floating down the river
jumps in saves it pretty soon there's all kinds of bodies floating down the
river and all kinds of people are jumping into the river
to try to save these bodies and then finally somebody asks the question
why are there so many bodies floating down the river well there's upstream
somebody else says there is a bridge that has a hole in it
and people don't recognize that or they don't see the hole and they fall through
and somebody needs to fix the bridge so when you ask these questions about
how can the arts and humanities museums libraries and the like
play a role in uh recognizing different identities what
what they can do so well is they can be there to help create an
environment where not only people can thrive but
they they can notice they they're part of the environment
that can say wait a minute that bridge is broken
and or it's at least rickety and we need to uh be there to help
shore it up uh so that people feel safe by walking across the bridge and know
that they're not going to be harmed and so there's something about the
presence of the arts and the humanities museums and libraries that creates an
environment a presence that says wait a minute i think this place is
thriving because it's recognizing that we're creating
a place where it is not only safe but energizing
i feel like i belong that's where the arts and humanities play
a better role uh right now than probably anybody because they know
that they are not stuck they're in this creativity mode where they can say
uh we can help uh it doesn't have to be stuck in
it's never been done this way before so now we get to uh because we know how to
create something out of nothing well it seems to me the bridge is a is a
great metaphor in and of itself connecting communities
and you know the the the view from the middle of the
bridge if you get a chance to slow down and get out of your car and take a
take take a look you can see both sides of the river and you can see up and down
the river and it's a pretty spectacular view it's a better it's a better view
than the view from just one side well i sure uh as much as we love uh the
arts and humanities or we would not have been involved the way we've been
i sure want to recognize that they play such a huge role
not only in the development of their own heart form
or their own you know writings history not only that that is that in itself is
so important but uh they play a huge role in just the
presence of the community more than they could probably articulate themselves
uh by creating that environment where people feel like they belong
yeah and you know uh horace says in the ours
poetica that that the poet tries to to create something useful
uh and uh also something that delights and uh the the the truth about the the
arts and and and the humanities uh is that there's there's delight uh
in in what we do the the the world of art the world
of music the world of literature is is so
so full of delights that we should all share and we should be so happy to share
what we know about something with someone else and and to invite them
to share uh share uh with us uh as well
um just hearing that seems to be is something we do
in the with the arts and the humanities that we're not doing enough
in this country with each other well i would absolutely agree that
there are so many opportunities for the arts and the humanities
not only to recognize but be that glue uh that can bring us together and
uh so the other thing i wanted to ask you about and
and and this has become a huge uh part of our discussion about the various
uh divides is the question of equity and how we make up for the the uh
uh the lack of uh serving certain parts of our community
through our history the uh uh the uh the under under-resourced
parts of our community if you will in many
cases deliberately uh uh so um what in
grant making institutions like the nea or the imls
can we can we do something about that can we
include socio-economic uh statistics can we
can we think in terms of uh long-term justice i mean equity really means
justice it's it's certainly a focus of the biden administration
um are there ways for us to to to work on that
certainly uh there are and there uh every you've named
uh some good ones because uh just by saying things like
recognizing uh even the data on it is an opportunity you have at your
fingertips so many wonderful uh so many wonderful agencies in the
federal government that do have access to figuring out
where there isn't equity but i think right now uh sharing stories
is a wonderful place to start however uh through your art or humanities form
that you do a story or calling attention to
something uh just like you just did with the air
and space museum that people didn't know before is a
really tangible practical first step there's
something about telling stories and you see plenty of them out there
that need to be highlighted so that the people do understand there's
some great things going on out there and some of them have been marginalized
in the past but now is the time to really
uh point attention to them when i started the library one of the
first stories i i tell this particularly in museum
groups um one of our branch managers said she she
was taking a group to the nelson atkins art museum
and one of one of her patrons in the library came up and said i can't go
and she said why can't you go and he said i don't own a tie
and uh you know that represents one of our the problems with high culture in
in in this country uh is that there is a sense that it's
for the elite and and it doesn't include everybody
and you know i know i know that your view is is the opposite of that but how
do we work on that how do we make sure that we invite everybody
in well you uh you can do it probably in several ways and one of them is to
stay in communication with the communities
all along the way some of this wearing a tie stuff
also has something to do with not having an
ongoing community relationship with each other
and bringing people along and helping them to know that they belong
so i'd certainly start there it's an ongoing relationship not a one-time
uh one-trick pony yeah i i took a group of kids from gladstone
elementary school in the kansas city school district to
the kemper museum and there was this fabulous docent there and
the museum had a a portrait exhibit from the
national portrait gallery from the smithsonian um
included amy sherrold and various very well-known artists
um and she did this great job she said she told the kids after explaining what
what the exhibit was about and showing them around
she said pick your your favorite painting and your least favorite
painting so they all went around and did that and then
she said now explain why and she took all them seriously and
at the end of this a little exercise they all felt some
ownership of the exhibit uh which i thought was it was really it
was really fascinating and and those kids will come back to a
museum feeling some sense of ownership of the of the
museum they'll feel that they're they belong there that's right that's
exactly right and not only because the museum had
wonderful objects to offer but because they were
recognized uh without judgment you know you
reminded me uh when you said that of a comment that julia irene kaufman
the chair of the kauffman center for the performing arts
was saying as we were all getting ramped up and opening and
she she really felt like the building was a
place for the next generation and so we would bring in thousands of kids but
she kept saying you know i really don't care if they
even fall asleep if they're engaged in some performance
that they're watching i just want them to
feel like they belong in this building because this will be available for them
sometimes it's the expectation of are we you know are you sitting up straight no
i just want you to feel like you belong here that's a great first step
that is you're so right so and now i want to shift gears a little bit and i
want i i think we have some of your own art
you as after segwaying out of the the nea
and and uh some consulting work you did for pbs
on this idea of collaborations at the local level you're doing your own
artwork and we're showing some of it uh now and i want you to talk a little
bit about about it and and i'm particularly
interested in the fact that this seems to be
uh um part of the same kind of culinary stew that you grow up with grew
up with the bok choy plus corn dog idea there seems to be some very chinese
aspects to this the dim sum uh the snake which is of course the
shape shifter in chinese mythology so what's your shape shifting to here well
in the big picture i just love drawing i've drawn since i was 15
and i really felt like this is an opportunity
to dive into what i so love and what time stands
still for me when i draw so pen and ink drawings are a lot of fun
for me but these objects so i've drawn that you can
see the black and white areas or places that i've drawn and the
ones you're looking at for the most part at least on the top line are from
kowloon and i take pictures wherever i go so
it is i mean i'm using my own reference photos
but also picking out objects to draw on top of them and it really is exactly
what you just said crosby it's a juxtaposition of dropping at one
object on top of one object which i've drawn on top of
another place that i've drawn because that's
sort of how i feel like i have grown up juxtaposing two
types of ways of looking at things in one
package so you see these um i showed i went to
chinatowns and i bought various objects and you see them
how i've drawn them on top of places in kowloon at the bottom you can see
a couple of flags and those are ones where i had
i think the flag in the next to last to the right
is actually inside the white house and the flag
at the end with the i voted yo vote sticker
is out just outside the white house i snapped that shot when i walked out one
day in a ceremony so um it really is about can you
juxtapose can i juxtapose me in several different
ways if i am feeling like i'm uh several different
perspectives all in one package yeah it's so
interesting you know the the beautiful uh slippers
uh and uh and and and and and then the sort of kowloon background that
you've got or i i like to to say you've gone from uh
bok choy and corn dogs to uh to uh dim sum and
there's a mcdonald's
the you know those lotus flippers that you see the third
uh on the bottom row with the third drawing in the middle
is really representative of my mother because she grew up
at first as a in a conventional chinese life before she came to america
and her father took a bold step instead of having
his wife had bound feet his mother had bound feet
and he had four daughters but and bound feet
came with in china a tradition of you know breaking bones in your foot and
bending it backwards so that they would grow
to be very tiny stubs oh god little lotus shoes so the purpose of it
on one hand was to make sure that tiny feet for some reason that was
the culture thought it was beautiful and then on another level it was so that
women could not run away and become independent
and so those lotus shoes when my mother's father said you know my
daughters are not going to do that he really went against the traditional
custom so my mother escaped having bound feet but at the same time the
neighbors said across the street i'm told by my mother
uh in china oh my goodness uh that family's daughters they're never going
to find a man to marry because their feet are so big
the system sometimes comes with uh comments from the neighbors
right exactly but you know how extraordinary what she did and how
extraordinary what you've you've done uh with her
inspiration um yeah are kathryn are there some
questions from our audience uh that we might have
yes there are i want to make sure i know there's another slide do we
do you want to keep oh sure yeah yeah please yeah please please
oh yeah good morning various places the one on the top left
is a wonderful alaska native totem pole in juneau and it just goes
from place to place uh there's next to it is a looking outside of the
opera house in dallas uh the ebenezer baptist church in
atlanta georgia where dr martin luther king
i believe john lewis had his service there
yale rep is the kauffman center for the performing arts
these are just drawings that are snapshots of locations
recognized seattle yep oh yeah markets uh there right yeah
uh dancing in uh california i believe it's in sacramento and i just
loved the ruffles on their costumes so that's uh why i drew it
and then there's the woolworth lunch counter in greensboro north carolina
uh so very snappy famous in in in our our history uh but but also could
could represent the great american art form too the art
of shopping that's a you that's a good point i did
grow up bad joke uh bad joke but um
well not not for all of us uh but yeah uh
yeah so uh catherine any uh can we go to questions now if there are
some questions from the audience yes all right let me read this first one
out um question for both of you i guess can
you talk a bit about statues this is about um tearing down
statues due to political unrest considering that this is
these are artistic works right that by people some of them potentially
um you know women and people of color that are being removed and then sort of
on the flip side about putting up statues as a jumping off point to
start conversation so jane you want to take first crack at
that let's see um
i wish there were more statues of people who were emotional who's
who we recognize as being emotionally intelligent because today we need
leaders who can synthesize and have the emotional
intelligence to be able to bring together the different
perspectives without shrinking back in the middle of
ambiguity and so i dream of statues if we're going to
have statues i dream of having ones that are recognized
uh for bringing people together and having a level of emotional
intelligence that sometimes is very difficult to
see in a tangible way but it is so present
and those are the leaders i want to pay attention to
uh in terms of crosby i was just going to say i
i agree i think what we ought to focus on is is who we really
would like to build uh statues too and who represents who we are today um i
think tearing things down without conversation in the
community is not a good idea some you know anybody wants to enlist me in
tearing down a statue of nathan bedford forest i i'll i'll do it but
i think there ought to be conversation about it and uh
lonnie bunch is really good on on on this subject and
elizabeth alexander had a great conversation with david blight and
natasha truthway about about this as well
recently uh interpretation is really important there's some things that we
shouldn't turn tear down we should interpret or add to
uh the statue of lincoln uh with kneeling uh formerly enslaved man
uh in uh in washington dc as as an example it needs to be interpreted and
uh it was interpreted by frederick douglass when it was at when it actually
was was was put up and then the other thing
i want to say is i think the imls has a role and maybe
the neh would would join with us in this and the
melon foundation has been working on this
in creating some movement as we go towards america 250 the 250th
anniversary of the declaration that we'll be celebrating in a national
level uh in uh in five years uh as we move
towards that maybe we can bring people together in
individual communities to to do exactly what jane's talking
about which is to build monuments to people who bring us together people
who who who create empathy in in the in the community and who represent i i
think also represent people who've been left out
i mean why are there no more statues to harriet tubman
i mean there ought to be a lot of statues to frederick douglass and to
harriet tubman whose lives are incredible lives incredible
lives uh and are about liberation liberation
of an entire uh people uh and and uh and there and
there are lots more and and more statues to people in the arts who
did things that are as jane points out there that are
healing to the to the community
some good questions for jane here so um one uh your beautiful art is evocative
and has many embedded symbols and you talk more about the process of
making your art and intellectual process behind it
um sure um in terms of the main piece as i mentioned before it's
really a juxtaposition of several different ways to look all in
one package the joy that i get of being doing pen
and ink art is highly detailed i'm trained in
uh you know drawing people and painting and things like that but
for me it seems like the pen and ink medium is the most fun for me um
so i do a lot of looking at my own reference photos i would never
pull any photos from any place else certainly not the internet but i
i only take reference photos of places icons so everything's very direct but
then from there it may be kind of intuitive one of the
things that i really love even though i have drawn
people before and was trying to draw all kinds of you know
nudes in school and things like that but there's something to me that is so
energizing about drawing objects and the reason is it's not
um a person and yet you uh an object can evoke a story of humanity
just uh you know we could we may all have keepsakes that we like and they may
be even if we compare them we they may be
even the same keepsake but we have different stories that
emanate out of the object so you'll see my drawing a lot of
objects certainly the ones you see today are
placed in a context of various places and settings
but those objects could unfold a whole person's life
so that's why i'm energized by drawing objects instead of the person
you'd think that if i was this interested in drawing in humanity which
i ain't drawing people and the humanity of
us all you'd think i'd be drawing people but
it's instead it's objects um that's probably where i'm focused
right now
very very cool um one more for you specifically how has place
influenced your sense of culture
for me that's for you well it absolutely um i learned
especially growing up in oklahoma and arkansas where there were
no chinese at the time that did influence me
but one of the one thing i noticed as an adult
is i did not realize how much it had how comfortable i was because i am
multiple cultures at the same time uh i didn't realize how
comfortable i was standing in the middle of that kind of
ambiguity until i saw other people who were not comfortable
and so there's something about my message that i wish i could say even
just through my own actions which would be it's totally possible
to be in multiple perspectives at the same time
without shrinking back it's totally possible to have both this
and that instead of you when i lose or either
this or that and because i have grown up and lived it
that is and i've seen different places and i've seen people respond in
different ways i just want to send out the message it
is totally possible to embrace it all
without one question about your art and it's relationship to your musical
training do you do you still play the piano
and do you feel any relationship between your your your drawing your your art
your plastic art and and your musical art
i uh i don't play the piano anymore i uh loved it and i think uh it was my
social life and you know my band life in high school
and i just loved all of it and i majored in
music in college but um i i love so i don't discount it
at all but there's something about expressing myself through visual arts
that is at least where i'm focused right now
different different things at different moments in your life that's right um
everybody has different phases the drawings you saw
you know like picasso has his rose period and his blue period and i had my
those are the drawings from my pandemic period
but no that is what i'm focused on in the moment
catherine another question um yeah we've got a couple more minutes this is sort
of a biggie but i think you guys might want to dig into this a little bit
um how do you think the museum world will forever be changed by this pandemic
i know crosby thinks about this a lot so
have at it well i i'll say a couple of things
about it and i'd love to hear jane's view of this uh it's really
one of the points of the this conversation but um
i i think a couple of things are true obviously true
the virtual um is is going to continue to be a big part of
the life of museums and libraries it's going to be a big part of
education it's going to be a big part of health care workforce development et
cetera all of that's going to be true it will
affect libraries and museums they need to be digitally enabled if they're not
you need to expand and be more creative and imaginative about doing that
the second thing that's true um post pandemic and this is still a question
but i'll say this is a question that that everybody's going to want to answer
and that is the thing we we know that museums and libraries are so
important and the arts the performing arts are so important in our lives
because that's what we miss the most during the pandemic and so how are we
going to get that back and it's going to be a little different
because not everybody's going to feel as comfortable as they did before about
mixing in big crowds and that sort of thing
but museums will figure it out and performing arts we'll figure it out
uh and and and we are going to come back
together because we that's what we miss the most
we need that i'd build on your comments crosby because uh
and one of them actually as you talked about
digital is not only connecting uh digital with each other where museums
can do that and are doing that but uh we're in this world now where
instead of digitizing an object in the museum
the digitized object is the artwork itself uh how do you make sure
you've put in storage uh how do you conserve those new types
of objects and artifacts that are
they start digitally um that will be something that i'm
confident everybody's been thinking about already but probably even more so
now with the pandemic people are paying millions
of dollars for for digital artworks i guarantee you there
are a lot of people thinking about that now
that's right another one is uh that i am seeing museums doing more and more and
uh so uh heartening and is really paying attention to
when we create the context of an exhibition are we
are we telling everybody's story who needs to or are we just telling one
person one side of it and not paying attention
to all the other ways that has that have affected people so museums are
uh uh getting better and better at many of
them are really paying attention to well we can't just tell one story uh
without telling how many other people were either harmed
or included in the big story but we didn't
include them before so i'm really heartened by that
and then again the presence of the community really be so
proud that you can be one of those um entities that brings people together
each in their own ways without force fitting everybody to be
exactly alike like you said crosby they'll figure it out and the reason
they can figure it out is because you know how to suspend and
create you know how to suspend judgment and create something out of nothing
and uh that's what's missing in so many other settings where people don't know
how to do that and they're stuck you know how to do it so i'm excited
about what can be done and the nea and the neh and the imls
will will help them that's our determination
as i know jane had that determination when she was
at the helm of the of the national endowment for the for
the arts it's been a great conversation jane i i really
really appreciate it catherine can we go on with questions or i know we've we've
reached i think yeah we are out of time i'm
afraid so thank you to everyone who sent in um sent in uh
questions and thank you to jane for joining us
today and for everybody for joining us um so this is going to conclude our
broadcast and this recording is going to be made available on our website
at imls.gov great