Olivia Gude: Right. She lives right in the neighborhood. The idea would be to have them do a community mosaic. So again, part of it is advocating for funding. And you know a lot of the times there is money available for funding. If it's for different kinds of building projects. Maybe not always. But sometimes, even if it's not an official percent for art thing, there is just money in contractors' budgets. If communities would just advocate for it. There's always like the community meeting where people sit around and complain. "We don't like the way you're doing this station." You know? Well, if people would go to those meetings and say, "Well you know what? We don't like some of this, but we'd feel better if you threw a public art piece in, that would involve the kids in our schools." People would have a lot of leverage to get that kind of stuff built into projects. And I'd say it's not an official percent for arts stuff. It's just the fact that when they're talking to the community, trying to get the community to buy in…as a matter of fact, that's how this happened. We went with people. I can't even remember who did it for us, to tell you the truth. But somebody who's living in Hyde Park alerted us. They went, we went, and they got people to go to some of those early meetings about the re-planning. That's how the stuff was built into the budget. It was at least built into the potential. I just want to show you this one figure, because I think she's really important, if you're going to work with this mural with kids. She is the only what I call "ringer" in the mural. In other words, every person who went by there was just somebody who happened to walk by and I'd talk to. Except for this one woman. I invited her to come down and talk to me. So that it was a set-up. The reason was as I worked on that mural, I noticed that in the cement in the ground was a swastika. Obviously, it had been put there when the cement was wet. It was a swastika gang sign, too. So it had been put there not as a Nazi sign, but as a gang sign. But I just felt so weird and creepy about…you know, here's the Walker piece and here's my piece, and I'm just going to ignore that there's this swastika in the sidewalk? So I considered a couple of alternatives. One I considered was just chipping out the sidewalk and putting in some more cement. But then I thought about it and I thought, "You know what? I'm going to ask this woman, instead." Her name is Edith Altmann. She's an artist in Chicago. You may have heard of her. She's a well-known artist. As a matter of act, there was a really famous incident that happened when she did this piece called "The Golden Swastika" at the State of Illinois Museum in downtown. She was a woman who fled Nazi Germany as a child, and has one of these hair-raising escape stories. One of the things that she's been doing in her work is looking at what she calls "the reclamation of the swastika." That it was originally a spiritual symbol all over the world, and then it was twisted and perverted by the Nazis. So the text of her piece is her looking at the swastika and talking about some of those things that she did. But as I say, she's the only person who I really wanted specifically to be there to hear about that. So you can see this gal's in the mural. As I opened this up today, I thought, "Oh, my gosh." And actually, maybe a good closing story for this would be to say that one of the real gifts to me…and I'll let you guys look at this a little bit…but one of the real gifts to me in doing this project. I was sitting there one day and I was painting. This young African American man probably 20 year old comes up and starts going, "Oh, this is cool. I like it." And I'm totally good at painting and talking at the same time. Then he said, "Yeah. You know, when I was a kid, there was this really cool mural that got done in my neighborhood." And I'm like, "Oh, yeah?" And he said, "Yeah. It was really great. There were these black people and these white people coming together from these two sides of this underpass. They painted this mural together. It was like such a thing, you now?" And I was like, "Whoa, really? Well…" And he started telling me all about this. And I'm saying, "Well, were you involved in this?" I mean…But, "Oh, no, no. But my cousin painted on this mural." And he was telling me the story. And then as the story unfolds, I obviously told him I was the one who painted the Roseland Pullman Mural. But for me, it was such a gift. Because in a way, you put these things out there and you don't know how they affect people. You don't know whether they become part of the fabric of peoples' lives. And I was always so struck by that story, because he was too young to have had anything to do with it. But he owned that mural. He owned that as part of his experience. Also, when you think about it, you work with these different issues of urban life and global life, and you think, "Does it make any difference what I do?" You know? But I think that for me, that story, that happening was all part of this really powerful moment where I was realizing that this young man didn't grow up with only that image, but hey, that William Walker show was so important. But he grew up with another image. And for me, it always makes me so emotional. It's always been one of the real treasures of my life to be given that story. Because you realize that for change to really happen, people have to grow up with different images. So that was one of the things that made me start reflecting more and more on this issue of what is the meaning of interracial murals, and putting that image out there for the social imagination. So anyway, that's a nice story.

M2: Thank you very much.

[applause]

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