(gentle music) (waves crashing) (gentle music) (waves crashing) (birds squawking) - My work has always been interested in history and how history never really leaves.

You are shaped by history, even though your interest and your ideology is the new.

But the new is always predicated on the past.

(gentle music continues) (waves crashing) (gentle music continues) (bright jazz music) Those containers, those ships, started to become really interesting to me because they reminded me of how history operated in the 15th century, when bodies and goods were transported throughout the world to fuel economies, and that we're right back there again.

In that way, it's not so far from what I was doing when I was a youth.

(frantic jazz music) Part of my interest in history came because I wanted to disprove what I thought made me a freak, which, of course, was that I could make art, and I didn't see any other Black people doing it.

And so my engagement in the civil rights movement led me to a concern about African Americans in the arts.

And to know that there were African American artists making art was so revelatory and extraordinary that I just ran to it.

(frantic jazz music continues) And so I began making works that could inspire and speak to African American audiences.

(frantic jazz music continues) And the Black Panther Party wanted to get artists to go into the community and make imagery.

So, mural painting became an important aspect, putting into practice the things I had learned in school, to take that education and bring it to the streets.

Because in 1968, the streets were ablaze.

(frantic jazz music continues) At the time, I was being trained to make art for its own sake, and because I lived in a time of rebellion, I rebelled against that.

(frantic jazz music) And I began to listen more to music which challenged my very idea of what music was.

Very abstract music.

Stockhausen, Monk, Bela Bartok.

You know, (mimics frantic jazz music).

(discordant music) That's why abstraction became so important to me.

(discordant music continues) But I didn't believe that abstract paintings were different from realism.

(discordant music continues) Multiplicity is what we are.

We are never one thing.

Even as a kid, I never subscribed to this idea in the West that you have to figure out what you want to be.

Do you want to be a abstract artist or do you want to be a realist?

Or do you... No, I don't.

I'm a maker.

I'm not an artist.

I'm a maker.

And as a maker, I don't have bounds.

I can make anything that I can make.

And therefore, anything is available to me.

(bright music) On my first trip to Europe, I went to Keukenhof Gardens, and the tulips really flipped me out.

Oh, I'll be right that way.

I just wanted to get the light on these flowers.

(bright music continues) I started trying to understand those tulips.

And so I took out my notebooks and I start filling them up with imagery, just pouring out this flower.

(bright music continues) In the 15th, 16th century, the Dutch began to sell and use this flower and that flower got cultivated through certain biological processes that changed its form, trying to get a perfected kind of flower.

And the way that came into my work, like, when I saw the flower, that made me think about the history of the movement of bodies, Black bodies, but also of the tulip.

And that parallel was so striking because, of course, Africans were bred later and they were created into varieties of which I'm a product.

And so the tulip became the perfect vehicle for my inquiry.

(frantic jazz music) What attracted me to this flower was how I associated it with how Black folks had made their way through the psychosis of American culture, designed to repress their every desire as slaves.

But just like this flower, they push through into the heavens, pointed toward the light of the sun.

(frantic jazz music continues) A human being is in a constant war with gravity.

From the moment you move your head upright as an infant, trying to resist the tendency of gravity to lock you in.

And that flower is demonstrating to me in that undulation that I saw that it was resisting, which is both difficult and joyful.

(frantic jazz music) (frantic jazz music continues) (gentle jazz music) (street noise humming) (ship horn blares) (birds chirping) I grew up in an area called Hunters Point.

My parents wanted to leave Arkansas, where both my parents lived.

My father came to work with a large number of African Americans coming from the South, migrating in the 1940s because the shipyards were absolutely teeming.

(birds squawking) But we went back to Arkansas all the time.

My father bought Cadillacs when we drove to Arkansas.

It wasn't until I got older that I understood the reason he bought a Cadillac, because he wanted his family to ride in comfort, because they couldn't stay in hotels.

(car engine humming) And he never stopped.

It took my father just under two days to get from San Francisco to Arkansas.

That generally took three days.

(street noise humming) We couldn't go to grocery stores.

It was sick.

We had to go around to terrible looking places to go use the toilet, and often we would have to pull off the road and use the toilet.

I think part of the reason I wanted to never go back to Arkansas was because of those experiences down there.

Like, one of the words I heard most often when my father would pull into a gas station is, "Where'd you get this Cadillac from?"

They would not pump the gas.

So, he would have to get his own gas 'cause, "We don't see no Cadillacs around here."

Man, you know, that's what I grew up in.

(bright jazz music) (bright jazz music continues) While studying Western art, I started a deep search to try to understand where I fit in, both my own history here in the United States, but as Malcolm articulated, we left our mind in Africa.

How do we recover it?

And we could only do it through a deeper knowledge of what African thought was.

And I began to try to integrate this way of thinking into my work.

And I saw an image of this in a book on slavery.

And this was used to collar Black people as they clamp this permanently, because it opens up, on their neck.

But in Africa, this was used as an instrument of dance that was worn on the body.

And not only that, it's sonic.

(collar clanking) But because it made noise, it could be used to subdue Blacks, a practical instrument to let them know when the Black body was moving too far in an environment.

The very opposite of what this was.

This is an object to expand the person into its universal relation to a cosmic consciousness.

(upbeat music) And it was the void that really got to me because that is exactly African stuff.

Potentiality is in the void.

That's when I started to paint this object, squeeze it and manipulate it, to transform this object.

(upbeat music continues) And then I went into that room where my son was standing, and he had thrown a hoodie up against the wall, and it looked like something was in this empty form.

Then I thought immediately of this and that hoodie.

So, this form created the hoodie.

(upbeat music) So, the hoodie is like the trickster figure among the Yoruba.

And this trickster figure is called Eshu.

In African form, there is this tendency to shapeshift and double sync forms.

And Eshu is really a bringer and a carrier of truth, just like the hoodie trying to undo some of the deification of art.

And therefore, the trickster carries many different components, many different aspects, many different possibilities, and that's why the hoodies are entities of consciousness.

They're pure energy.

(upbeat music continues) The Chicago Art Ensemble had a record called "Certain Blacks."

♪ Certain Blacks do what they wanna ♪ ♪ Certain Blacks groove on love ♪ ♪ Certain Blacks, certain Blacks ♪ ♪ Dig they freedom, dig they freedom ♪ (singers screaming) (frantic drum music) - Now that, "Do what they wanna," always stuck with me.

And so I wanted whatever comes out of this form.

♪ Do what they wanna ♪ Do what they wanna (discordant music) - Join them, yeah.

(laughs) (waves crashing) (birds squawking) - Looking at the seas and those great ships, I started to think about shipping and its history.

And then I started walking around in Oakland along the piers for many years before I understood why I kept coming down here to walk and be around all this chaos.

And it turned out to be the colors and the light and all fitting into this sort of system.

Like, how do you make something so efficient but beautiful at the same time?

And when you make it ominous, huge, powerful, it represents something psychologically.

And so it's bigger than you.

And so you become small in it.

That whole thing about stacking, like stacks of money, stacks of class.

Where you are in that stacking.

(waves crashing) (waves crashing continues) And then when their contents spill out, all those bananas and shoes and detritus from our cultural excess winds up going somewhere.

But we don't see it, because they spill out in the ocean, like all those dead Black bodies during the Middle Passage, floating in the ocean, washing ashore.

(waves crashing continues) And then I saw "The Slave Ship."

(gentle orchestral music) And like going to the Keukenhof Gardens, I was once again stunned, unable to move, because Turner had infused a kind of deep spiritual power in the face of horror.

(gentle orchestral music continues) So, I paid attention to every mark that he had made.

I saw the way he built it, the way he enveloped the work with a kind of translucency.

(gentle orchestral music continues) I knew I had to find a way to do what he was doing with light with these container ships.

So, what could I use?

(gentle orchestral music continues) The answer was in icon paintings, gold leaf.

So, in this piece, at first it looks like a ship with its containers falling off, and then it could be bullion, gold.

The only real God in the capitalist modality.

(gentle orchestral music continues) When I was young, I had no hope of being in a gallery or a museum.

Now, of course, you can't have a museum that doesn't reflect to some degree the diversity of the country.

The 21st century will not look like the 20th.

And, therefore, I'm hopeful because I know change is inevitable in that way.

But the art world is always going to serve ideology.

It serves the wealthy.

Like right now, it needs the work of African Americans and Asians and the diversity of the world.

The arts need it in order to facilitate commerce.

(gentle orchestral music continues) Because art is a powerful instrument, and that's why power uses it.

It's the first thing they use, and then it's the first thing they attack.

But as an expressive person, the freest you will ever be is making what you want to make.

So, your role is to make.

(frantic music) (frantic music continues) Every little while and again, I wind up putting something else in.

Like, I didn't mean to put those crows in there, but a black bird landed on my deck and that meant to me that the black bird wanted to be in the painting.

(frantic music continues) They're coming to take these to New York, so I'm trying to finish them up to just see if they do what they need to do.

And I got about 9 or 10 hours to do that.

(frantic music continues) Okay.

Well.

(discordant music) (upbeat jazz music) (audience chattering indistinctly) (upbeat jazz music continues) (audience chattering indistinctly) (upbeat jazz music continues) (upbeat jazz music continues) (audience chattering indistinctly) (bright music) (birds chirping) I'll show you some ideas that I have for some newer works.

You make this stuff, but you don't know how people are going to deal with it.

(laughs) It's not that you're painting to elicit a particular response.

You don't know.

But you can feel the energy in the piece because you know it's right.

Like, the minute I saw that, I knew I could do something with it.

(bright music continues) Picasso explored the transformation of the human form that African art had been exploring thousands of years ago.

Because when you see something freaky, something that you can't get out of your brain, that means that that thing is so profoundly interesting that it's re-forming the way you think.

That's why you're following it.

(bright music continues) The very act of painting or dance or literary utterance is a resistive.

Resistance is your absolute willingness to speak your tongue.

And therefore, as a maker, you have a special obligation to live through the materials.

But whichever way, it's a portal, and painting is my portal.

(bright music continues) (frantic jazz music) (frantic jazz music continues) (gentle jazz music)