In 7 Days: Imprinting a Moment of History Nicola Green, Matt Frei, Sarah E
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In 7 Days: Imprinting a Moment of History Nicola Green, Matt Frei, Sarah E. Lewis, and Alex Dimsdale. At The Library of Congress https://vimeo.com/36981080 On October 5th 2011, the British Council partnered with the Library of Congress in Washington to celebrate their acquisition of the series of prints Nicola Green produced in response to her experience following then-presidential candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008. The artist herself joined us for a panel discussion about her work with journalist Matt Frei of the UK’s Channel 4, art historian Sarah E. Lewis, and Alex Dimsdale from The British Council moderating. Nicola Green Social Change and the American Presidential Campaign Alex Dimsdale: I’d like to introduce you to our star-studded panel. Starting with Sarah E Lewis, Sarah is a brilliant scholar and curator, also the most glamorous Art Historian that I think I’ve ever seen… Sarah E Lewis: Come to New York! Alex Dimsdale: She’s also perfectly placed to talk about the transatlantic nature of the pieces, because she began her career at the Tate gallery in London, and then has also worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is about to take up a job, in fact, at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she’s also writing a book about art and how incepts with politics in the Nineteenth Century, so she’ll be able to give us a really interesting perspective on that. Sarah is also on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee so she’ll have an interesting take on that. Next up, Matt Frei, who you will all know as the former BBC correspondent, he headed up BBC World News America, which was a programme I used to work on actually as a lowly producer, and he was always wonderful! Matt has since then been poached by Channel 4 News, Matt covered the 2008 campaign extensively, and I really can’t think of someone better to talk about that particular political moment because he has this wonderful as an insider and an outsider as well, which it will be interesting to contrast with Nicola’s perspective as an artist. Which brings me to Nicola, Nicola is the heroine of the hour tonight, she’s the creator of these really extraordinary works that you see hanging around us. Nicola graduated with distinction from the University of Edinburgh College of Art, and since then her work has been shown on both sides of the Atlantic, at the Courtauld Gallery in London, at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. She’s also got a particularly interesting personal take on politics in that she’s married to the British Politician David Lammy, so that’s fed into some of her work. I’d like to kind of start things off by just asking Nicola a little bit about when you created the work, what were you, what did you want to achieve when you set out to make these pieces? Nicola Green: Well, I think I’m going to go right back to 2005, when I was pregnant with our first son, and my husband actually came on a trip to the US and met Obama, and came back and told me that he was thinking of running. As a mother, pregnant with my child, and thinking about the world that my child was going to come into, I really started turning my attention to what this world was going to look like. And, thinking as a mother who was actually going to have children that were actually going to look different to me, that was something that I really started to think about in ernest. As an artist it’s my job to look at people and think about their stories, and the stories that surround them, and this was really a powerful story. Then in 2007, when I was pregnant with our second son, I met Michelle, who came over shortly after the campaign started, who came over to the UK. I met her in London, and I was incredibly inspired and determined in that moment that I needed to tell this story for my children and for their generation, and I really wanted to use that opportunity to think about all themes contained in this story in much greater detail, as an artist. So, I asked Obama if I could do a portrait, and I thought it would be one trip and one portrait. I was able to go to Denver where he accepted the nomination, but as soon as I was there I realised it was a story that was much much bigger than him. It was a story about all of us really, it was a story about the campaign, the campaign staff, it was a story about the American people, but it was also a story about the global community that were watching. So I made many trips from that moment in Denver to inauguration, and I drove through the rain, and I did lots of drawings with people standing through the night waiting to go and queue to go to see him speak in different parts of America. I took hundreds of photographs and did hundreds of drawings in my sketch book, some of which you can see in the little pamphlet that you’ve got on your chairs. And then I would go home after these trips and take all of these drawings and photographs and experiences, and I would make more drawings and I would use the silkscreen print method to expand the themes in my creative process, and then try and distill and think through that research, in a way, what these themes meant and how to contain all of these stories into one set of work, and what I ended up with was these seven large silkscreen prints. Each one is a literal distillation of my experience of one trip, or a combination of days on trips, as well as distilling the wider thematic journey in the story. So for me, this work as a collection of seven images is a deconstruction of hope, and what that actually is, so what happens when people come together to try and make something happen. I wanted to tell that more universal story, so that my children and generations after them, and all of us, could be reminded of what we can achieve, whatever it is that we want to achieve. Alex Dimsdale: It was an incredible time and you were sort of flying backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, I know everyone here was probably watching it, really completely focused on this extraordinary moment that was happening. I just thought it would be interesting to ask, I want to ask all of you, but I guess starting with Sarah, what was your strongest visual memory, what’s your strongest visual image that you can remember from the election campaign? Sarah E Lewis: Wow, you know really there’s several, there’s so many, in fact for me I have a sort of corpus of them in my mind. But, the one that pops up most viscerally, most immediately when people ask that, is perhaps because of the incredulity of that moment, something that maybe no photograph could capture, and it was my own visual memory of sitting, where I was, in my, then, New Haven apartment trying to finish a dissertation, begun on British Council funding- thank you for that, when I was at Oxford University! Making good on my promise to complete it! And so I was being diligent, and I was writing, and all of a sudden my ears were just pierced by that sound of not just joy, but joy that comes when something that you’d never thought would happen occurs. All throughout the city of New Haven, when I was based up there, you could hear people just screaming on the night of the election, and that to me is actually the memory, it’s almost the blackness of that night just pierced with all those sounds. Alex Dimsdale: How about you Matt? You were travelling with the campaign. Matt Frei: Well actually, there are so many images that come to mind and so many sounds. But, I remember meeting Barack Obama the first time when he was on book tour in New Hampshire, which is one of the whitest states in America. He gave a speech in a room, about the same size as this room- actually looking remarkably similar without the wonderful paintings and the works. It was absolutely jam packed, this is a book tour and there were three thousand people in and around this hall, and he was the only black face in the crowd. People were going nuts! And this was a book tour, you know of course it was the beginning of an unofficial campaign, but it was a book tour! He had a pile of books and he was signing them, and he gave a speech that was kind of the beginning of his ‘Stump’ speech. I remember this reporter from the local New Hampshire TV station, standing on one of the tables, with sort of Barack Obama right behind him, it was a slightly insalubrious shot actually because Obama’s face was literally underneath this man’s legs! Looking up! He was wearing a very ill-fitting jacket, and had a very large, sort of ice-cream shaped microphone, and literally couldn’t contain himself, he said: “I’ve never seen anything like this in my thirty five years of covering New Hampshire, and the Primaries and what’s going to happen here, this is unbelievable!” And then, you combine that reaction, and you know, the New Hampshire voters are like the biggest political snobs apart from perhaps the people of Iowa, they’ve seen everyone! You know, if G.