Episode Notes:

Art doesn't emerge in isolation, and it doesn't end there either. What we owe our artists, and what they owe us back, shapes the culture we all inherit.

In this episode, we return to Whitechapel Gallery in London for part two of our conversation with Mariana Mazzucato, Whitechapel Economist in Residence and a professor at University College London; artist Alvaro Barrington; and Bridgespan partner Darren Isom, in conversation chaired by Gilane Tawadros, director at Whitechapel Gallery, as part of the gallery's Art Futures series on the value of culture.

Picking up where part one left off, Alvaro reflects on the creative eras and communities that shaped his own practice before the floor opens to audience questions. Together, the panel explores what artists owe their communities, what philanthropy owes when it comes from a place of love rather than obligation, and why measuring what we value may be the key to building something different.

Transcript:

Darren Isom:

Welcome back to Dreaming in Color Live and to part two of our conversation from Whitechapel Gallery. In part one, we explore culture’s foundational role in the economy, AI, and philanthropy with Gilane Tawadros, Mariana Mazzucato, and Alvaro Barrington. Now we pick it back up with Alvaro on what's driving his work as an artist, plus audience questions and closing reflections from the whole panel. Let's get back into it. 

Gilane Tawadros:

Alvaro, I wanted to talk to you because you are a practicing artist, a very successful artist. You're making an intervention yourself. You're creating structures of your own and making an intervention in the landscape of cultural production and education. Would you like to talk a bit about that and why you're doing that? What's driving you?

Alvaro Barrington:

I grew up in an era that if you gave that creativity to any other community, head would explode. And what I mean by that is musically in America, black Americans between the '60s to the '80s, unmatched musically. The creation of everything from Motown, Aretha Franklin, Prince, late Miles, Funk, Jazz... I mean, so much music was invented during that 20 year span. But I grew up in a slightly different era where it's like everything from Michael Jordan to movies, to music, to fashion, to everything. And even though we were really, really, really, really poor, we just never really felt it because there was just so much creativity, Sean Paul, reggae, everything. It was just around me. 

And so, I felt very privileged of growing up in that era. And so, I just became really excited about what does it mean to, first thing, thank those people because I see a lot of them. And I go, "Wow, I'm so grateful that you were creating great music. You were creating great parties, institutions." None of it had support, but they were just doing it and it spread around the world, making amazing things. And I'm excited about doing what those folks did for me, giving me things to look forward to every week and discuss it and rap and talk about it. And so, I just thought if I'm an artist, which means I'm a cultural producer, I have to want to be able to do exciting things. 

But cultural production, I think has sort of the challenge of my era is back then all those industries, in order to become interesting in hip hop, for example, you had to. The reason why all the rappers go on from Brooklyn or from Bed-Stuy or whatever is because your neighborhood had to vouch for you, which means that you had to speak about the truths of your neighborhood. That means everybody in your neighborhood had to go, "Yep, that's what they do over in Bed-Stuy." And they had to know you. They had to see you at the corner rapping. They had to see you at the school lunch table. You had to play basketball. Whether you're Kobe Bryant, you had to go to Rutger Park. 

You had to be where people could see you. And I think what's weird about what kind of became a neoliberal version of arts in my era was you went to Yale or you went to Slade. Then you made paintings that looked like a famous artist, could name any of them. And then all of a sudden, five collectors decide you're a million dollars. And that's where value came from. And then you bought a house in Essex or some far place, you know what I mean? For the Hamptons. And it no longer became you owed a responsibility to your community first. You had to be celebrated by your community before you got celebrated anywhere else.

And so, for me, it became really important to not believe that, not believe that, oh, you're successful because you went to Slade and then you made bad versions of Peter Doig paintings. You know what I mean? That's not-

Audience:

No shame.

Alvaro Barrington:

No shame. I mean, I think it actually misses what Peter did or what Tracy or any of these artists did of being out here. I love seeing Gilbert and George walking down. It's like I see them and I go, "Wow." It's like unicorn. You know what I mean? It's like, I love it because I see they were here. And so, I think as artists, we have to get back to really building within the community. And that means listening to our community. And so, the education for me is not so much about educating, but it's about how can I be honest? And I completely forgot what the question was.

Gilane Tawadros:

It's absolutely okay because what you've actually just articulated so beautifully, Alvaro, is that invisible value that is so very, very difficult to capture through a metric, through a report, through a set of statistics, which is the very subject of our conversation tonight. How do we communicate in a world where increasingly the culture is being caricatured as something which is woke, something for the metropolitan elite? And yet what you've just articulated is how it is actually something fundamental to our capacity to be human beings, to cross political divides, racial divides, economic divides, and find a shared space in which we can connect as human beings. How do we value that, Mariana?

Mariana Mazzucato:

So, it's just so interesting because there's actually a deep connection between what you were talking about, right? Because if you have a philanthropic model, and let's just even assume it's good philanthropy. There's lots of bad philanthropy. Even the good philanthropy, it's sort of a lottery model, right? You're talking about how do we have a model that is systemic, that values the communities that are actually creating the art, the collective value creation in the first place. And in economics, one of the ways I've been thinking about this, it's about pre-distribution, not redistribution.

So, even in Brazil, I've been really inspired and learned so much from the indigenous communities in the Amazon where on the back of the Bolsa Familia, which was a redistributive policy, which the government, Lula, very important government that reduced poverty was giving to women on the basis of basically sending their school children, sorry, their kids to school. So, it was like a redistributive policy, help reduce poverty, but it was done if you want at people.

And the Amazon indigenous community said, "You know what? Fine. Of course, we need to reduce poverty, but the best way to reduce poverty is pay people directly for the knowledge that they have for the innovation that they've been contributing to in their communities." And she said, "Look at us in..." And this is, sorry, the secretary for traditional peoples, her name is Edel Moraes who works in the ministry of the environment who's led by Mariana Silva in Brazil. She said, "Think of it as a Bolsa Verde, right?"

So, instead of giving money to people without really valuing them, coming back to the previous point, you're giving money to, for example, the indigenous communities instead of to the NGOs, instead of to the philanthropy, instead of random civil organizations, to the traditional peoples who have been preserving the forest, who have deep knowledge about water, about biodiversity for hundreds of years, and we haven't valued them. And that has been part of their impoverization. So, George the Poet, who's one of my PhD students, I must say it's very hard to be a supervisor because he's one of the smartest people I know. You might know him, George Mpanga.

He goes by George the Poet, Peabody Award-winning artist. He says the same thing for music. He says, "Currently, we have a lottery model where we don't actually invest in communities. We don't invest in the distributive kind of welfare state, youth centers, community centers." Think of the Camden Roundhouse, for those of you who know it, that's like an exception. It's not the norm in our communities. And yet so many young people create music, rap, hip hop, grime, drill, but one in a million make any money. Imagine if we normalized those talents, created.

I mean, he once said make it as boring as accounting in terms of actually looking at that huge supply chain, what I talked about as the production system behind Carnival and pay for it at source, value it, resource it. If you do that, you can reduce inequality immensely, but also have a much more creative economy away from the creative sector towards a creative economy. And I think in philanthropy, the best thing they can do is support those processes, which ultimately would render them irrelevant. The best metric for a philanthropy would be, are you continuing to have to step in to save the day, to fund the arts, to fund health, to do a bit of climate change here and there? If so, you're part of the problem.

You're not only part of the problem because of where the money came from. Think of the Bezos Earth Fund. This is Bezos who runs Amazon, not the forest, but the company who, again, evaded tax, treated their workers quite badly for many years. I don't know if it's improving, but lots of very good data from labor economists and what actually happened in Amazon factories. And then on the back of these massive rents puts 0.1% of their funds in a philanthropy called the Bezos Earth Fund, which is supposed to help organizations with their climate strategies. Who could think that that's a good model? Pay your workers properly, pay your tax. And then if something is left over in the end, fine, set up your foundation.

But ultimately that foundation has to be helping those problems that create, whether it's climate change or inequality, at source, be reduced, which if it's successful, we should rely less on philanthropy. And what I see in the cultural sector is the opposite. We have an increasing need for philanthropy precisely in an era, you said the word neoliberalism since the '80s. We have under-resourced so many different types of public services. We saw this in the UK where we had 14 years of austerity, cut everything and look at a lot of the consequences of that, hence my point of the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action.

We cut youth centers, public libraries, mental health, mental health support for so many young people. Is it surprising now that there's been an increase in crime? So, looking at the social and economic determinants of health and wellbeing, the social and economic determinants of crime, but not just seeing it as kind of like ex-post, "Oh, let's go help the poor," but at the center of actually recognizing the value that so many people provide to society, but we're not paying it for it. So, I think it's just interesting to think of the examples that you gave. And also George the Poet's point that rap is social broadcasting. It's talking about that lived experience.

But how do we do then what he talks about, George the Poet, who says songs make jobs. Songs should make jobs. We should normalize that job creation process throughout the whole creative industry, the whole supply chain, and yet we don't. And if philanthropies did that, I really believe that in the long run, we wouldn't need so much philanthropy in arts and culture.

Darren Isom:

Yep. Can I jump in there? Because I think those are all great points.

Gilane Tawadros:

We need to open up because we have an amazing audience and I can see the hands shooting up before we've even got the microphone. So, Darren, perhaps you can wheel your point in and answer to some of these questions.

Jack Campbell:

Hello, I'm Jack Campbell from the Campaign for the Arts. Thank you for a wonderful event. I just wanted to ask a question about the relationship between imagination and democracy. Mariana, you spoke in your talk about the blockbusterization of culture. And it reminded me of an article that I read recently in which the author was lamenting what they saw as an increasingly homogenous West End theater scene. They were saying too many theaters seem full of familiar titles and familiar actors from the latest Netflix series or from a TV series that we've already seen. And they were lamenting the fact that you seem to have to have these familiar ingredients.

I imagine if you spoke to theater producers today, they might say, "Well, it's a pretty risky thing making shows and maybe it's a risk averse move, but it's a necessary one." And so, we could think of measures like making it cheaper to having tax reliefs on productions or subsidizing venues, business rates, or all these things we could do to maybe make it cheaper and easier to put on a wider range of work. But this is where my question comes in. It's possible that we could do all of that and find that people actually still wanted to go and see the well-known stuff with the famous people in it because we don't just shape culture, culture shapes us.

So, my question is how given that do we make sure that. Is it the role of artists to kind of cut through all of that and provide imagination and vision that the rest of us haven't yet had? Or do you envisage these imaginative approaches being arrived at more collectively and more democratically?

Gilane Tawadros:

If I could just come in here, I think we forget about the instances when actually culture was much more democratic and publicly available.

Mariana Mazzucato:

Yeah, exactly.

Gilane Tawadros:

Play for the day was absolutely radical in bringing the best playwrights, the best writing to people from all kinds of backgrounds. Channel 4 was amazing in the early years, commissioning writers, artists, filmmakers, and bringing really cutting edge culture. So, I think one has to think about how people access culture and what opportunities people have rather than making a presumption that people will only want certain things. Mariana, sorry, I accepted your point.

Mariana Mazzucato:

No, no. It's a fantastic answer.

Alvaro Barrington:

I also have a good thing from an artist side. I think more and more artists have to win people over. I think there's just this sort of... And it could be a consequence of how expensive education, all of that has become. But I think as an artist, you have to make art that your friends love and that your family love. And I think if you're starting with like, I just need to be at the West End or wherever, you've already failed. If you can't convince your friends and the people who don't like you that this is good, then why should you have a shot? I just think you have to make good art. 

Darren Isom:

Yeah. Can I jump in there? Because I feel like we've lost the plot in so many ways. I think that we've, in some ways, confused being profitable or making lots of money with good. And so, I think from a movie perspective, from a theater perspective, unless something can make a lot of money, we don't value it, right? There's a lot of stuff that makes a lot of money that's not good. I would joke that on Instagram, usually people with the most followers are not the best people from a content perspective or thinking perspective. There's this light culture that we've created. And so, I do wonder, going back to the point you made earlier, how do we get back to a place where good art is relevant?

It's grounded in community, and it speaks to its particular perspective and it introduces us to new ideas. That's the whole point of arts and culture. Institutes new ideas as opposed to making profitability or it's not profitability. I joke, my mother talks about all the time how when she was a young girl, if you were a business owner, small business owner in the States, if your business employed two or three people, you made enough money at the end of the year to pay all your bills, put your daughter in private school, because the girls had to be properly educated, the boys, there were options.

And maybe take your family out to vacation for two weeks a year and give everybody a turkey at Thanksgiving and a ham at Christmas. If after doing all that you broke even, it was worth keeping the business open. We created a model now that unless the business makes millions and billions of dollars, it's not worth doing, right? So, how do we shift what good looks like and what the answer is in a way that's not what's more maintainable, it's more scalable, it's more realistic, but also in a way that we don't romanticize capitalism and what capitalism creates from a systems' perspective?

Mariana Mazzucato:

Yeah. I mean so I think it's a really important question. And I think one issue is if you think of it like a portfolio perspective, so think of how universities are run, right? Often, the graduate departments are sometimes loss making, but the university uses the income from the undergrad to reinvest in the different parts, right? So, there's a bit of a redistribution within the portfolio. What we're actually seeing right now is not that, right?

We're seeing the blockbuster side growing and growing, but that's also not just because it's not getting reinvested in, but even when it does get reinvested, what it's investing in isn't creating that ecosystem, that supply chain of the kind of biodiversity, which Margareth Menezes talks about again, today's culture minister in Brazil when she talks about Brazil Creativo, she literally looks at the ecosystem of the cultural areas and whether we're investing in those communities coming back to Carnival, so little of the money that is created by Carnival, even the dynamic side, but let's just look at the static amounts are invested in the Samba schools, in the workshops, in the steel drum schools.

So, how do we make sure that the money that is created by the blockbusters are invested? This comes back to my point about predistribution at source of where that creativity comes from. And if that's done well properly with, as you said, kind of a more collective participatory governance system, that also ultimately changes how people understand the future possibilities. So, it's not like we have blockbuster here and kind of independent art there. By investing in those processes, the whole ecosystem, the supply chain of how this bit is created, you're empowering the kind of participatory processes which then allow the voices of those creatives to be as high as the others.

So, I think there is this complete asymmetry of power. And I come back to philanthropy, I think hides that power often. So, I think that the point of government, at least in democratic elected societies, even though we know democracy in those societies is problematic, is supposed to be giving voice.

Darren Isom:

I'm going to jump in here because you beat up on philanthropy before and I didn't get to defend it. And I am not, for the record, out here defending white male billionaires. So, I want to make sure that's perfectly clear. I think the very existence of philanthropy at that scale is indicative of a problem in our society, but here we are, right? And here we are. I do think that we have to think about philanthropy differently. And so, in one of my articles, and Cora Daniels is here, editors I work with. We coined the phrase, we have to think about stop thinking of philanthropy as being pale, male and stale, right?

I think Black Americans and Black communities have demonstrated philanthropy at its earliest and most powerful forms, right? I love to think about how within New Orleans, I'm from New Orleans, as anyone from New Orleans will say at least 20 times when you talk with them. We have this tradition of second lines, right? And second lines is basically these jazz funerals that exist. It's not the first line. The first line is the mortar. The second line that people celebrating behind the mortar, right? It's a jazz funeral. It's a beautiful thing. It exists across the city. It's part of our culture as a city.

What people don't know is that second lines exist because historically people of color, New Orleans had a big free Black population, but also a population of Blacks who were not free. They were hiding. They were maroon colonies in the city themselves, and they couldn't get insurance because they were paperless. And so, they created these social aid and pleasure clubs. Philanthropy. The Social Aid and Pleasure Club, as long as you paid into it, you were promised a proper funeral, a stipend for your partner after you died, and a second line funeral. And so, the second line was literally they would parade through the wealthiest neighborhoods to remind them that we take care of ourselves. That's philanthropy, right?

And so, I think that however we can think of philanthropy as not just being problematic rich white men, because that's another conversation for another day. But if we can think about how do we actually use philanthropy to show what we appreciate? How do we nominate ourselves as philanthropists in the work and thinking? How do we protect organizations like Whitechapel and others that we care about as folks who make decent amounts of money, right? I think that's a really powerful role for philanthropy and we have to think about it that way. I think also, how do you think about philanthropy as being something that's done from a place of love?

I think a lot of folks in the philanthropic world's philanthropic structures, they do this work because that's what they're paid to do, but they don't love the communities that they're actually supporting. And when you love the folks in the communities that you're supporting, you give very differently. Your expectations are different. How you think about the work is different. And I think philanthropy from a place of love for the communities and respect is a very different game and one that we should model more so.

Gilane Tawadros:

Sorry. And this gentleman is also waiting. 

Michelle Williams Gamaker:

Yes. Okay. Thank you so much to all of you. I'm Michelle Williams Gamaker, an artist and educator. I'm really interested in trying to kind of tie across all your points that yes, we've had blockbusterization and lottery models and that somehow made artists either despondent or lose capacity or forget that they have a duty to build community. I think a lot about someone like Paul Tech who spoke about this idea of artist service and an artist having a role as serving. And yet it seems like there's really a marginalization or holding pattern for artistic labor, which I think that if we are meant to be deployed in communities, it feels like governments disrespect communities.

And yet I want to get artists into government to do something about their labor on a much more profound level. And it just feels like there's a holding pattern with our artistic labor that I'd love to hear more on, not necessarily in this moment, but it's like we are being held. I mean, we are doing the work I think in our communities, but it doesn't get through to the people who have power. And I'm just trying to work out how we deploy artists better to serve more because we've got all the skill sets of problem solving and yet we are really in a holding pattern of our artistic labor not reaching the people who can make change. We make change in our communities. So, I'm just like, how do we get that next bit?

Alvaro Barrington:

I want to just say, usually I get slightly banged about those because I think every community has artists. My niece is here. She's an artist. She does hair. I think though, any educated person would graduate and not go and look for the person doing hair as the artist in the neighborhood. But she's the artist in the neighborhood. And I think it's like we go to those neighborhoods and we go, "But where's the painter?" You know what I mean? We look for art, not in how that community is creative, but how we have studied art. And I think for me, I grew up with so much different artists. The break-dancers.

So, many different people. Even though the rappers became what everybody knew globally, you were more interested in the break-dancer. You were more interested in who braided your hair. There's so many songs about braiding your hair. You know what I mean? So, I think that's how I generally approach it. It's like how do we go to those spaces and find who actually is a creative and then say, okay, we're going to build a systemic model to support that understanding that you are the creative in that neighborhood? I think oftentimes, and this is sort of something maybe, I think there's a big challenge between these institutions as a public good and then the market.

So, I think for me, the market is about what makes you feel alive today and do you have the capital? But I think in terms of the artists, I feel like my challenge is I grew up around so many artists, but there was no systemic recognition for them.

Gilane Tawadros:

But maybe this is what we need to think about is this idea of culture being a system of production, as Mariana said, and also ecosystem as has been said. These are all elements within a system that needs to be understood as having multiple parts and multiple creative forces and multiple elements that each are contingent upon each other. And we can't actually separate out one and fetishize that whether it be the market or the artist who's doing very well. All of this is needed to create this ecosystem. I think there's a gentleman who's been waiting very patiently here at the front.

Chris:

Hi, my name is Chris. I'm an urban planner and a developer. I'm loathe to ask the question because I think we're a little bit over time. All right. So, Alvaro, I was struck very much by what you said. Government owes us great art. What do we owe the art community is a little bit what I'm trying to understand. It's about reciprocity. So, we can critique how to measure success. We know that somehow, culture at the center of our economy and our government and our city is what we're talking about. We expect the economy, the government and the city to owe us great art. What do we as the artistic community owe back to this city, to the government and to the economy? So, it's about reciprocity. Thank you. 

Alvaro Barrington:

What do we owe art? That's a hard question. I don't know if I'll answer the question, but this is where my mind is going. I think we owe art... Really, I think a lot of people tend to go to see art, not to learn about how somebody else sees the world so we can expand how we understand the world. I'm not in Taylor Swift's demographic, but-

Audience:

Let's do it again.

Alvaro Barrington:

I'm not a Swiftie, but I was like, "Wow." Understanding that we're in a period where dating is just like swiping an app or whatever. And communication has been dominated in such weird ways. Of course, we're in a space where so many people are not communicating relationship wise. So, you're going to turn to Taylor Swift who's talking about her own journey in that. And so, I listen to Taylor Swift to understand why somebody who listens to Taylor Swift, how they see the world.

And I think there's too many times we go look at art to justify how we see the world as opposed to like, "Oh, you being honest with how you see the world helps me understand the world, maybe understand my neighbor who maybe doesn't have the language or have the time or even care to explain it to me because they have other things going on." I think we have to go in, look at Veronica's show, look at Senga's show to try to understand what they see. And I think there's too many times we're going in for nothing to do with the art. We're going in to justify some random market value or whatever.

We're not going in to go, "Wow, this person has put their soul into this thing. And if I understand this world, then I understand my world a little bit bigger."

Speaker 8:

I will try. Thanks Gilane. I've really appreciated the need for having multiple strategies. I think a strategy that we have to reckon with for civic futures that democratize art is also trying to think about how creativity and artists are part of the relational commons. So, how do we create material conditions that let us play, create instead of returning to this idea that art and artists are commodity and content, but actually the conditions that let us be in a practice of imagination creativity?

Gilane Tawadros:

Thank you. Anyone want to comment on that?

Alvaro Barrington:

Could you say that question again?

Speaker 8:

I just want to throw into the space that if we're trying to democratize art, we can't keep going in the direction of making art and artists commodity or content. We have to think about the material conditions that actually let us all be artists and practice creativity and play as an inherent dignity.

Alvaro Barrington:

I guess my response would be every community has their artist. It would just be for me, not so much about can you bring those into the market? But I wish there was spaces of where all the great break-dancers or graffiti artists or hair braiders or whatever, all the creatives in my neighborhood were given systems to support themselves and understand that they know that they're on the ancestors of the stories that their grandma told them or whoever. I think Europeans have done a great job of saying, this is a Titian painting. I don't think we've done enough of a job for all the creativities that exist. And saying we're going to support, systematize it, build institutions around it, give access to it. I don't think we've done that.

Gilane Tawadros:

Sorry, go on.

Darren Isom:

No, I think in the same note, my good New Orleans Jesuit Catholic grandmother used to always say that God's greatest gift to man was that or free will. If you want us to be the same, it would've made us the same. Was that easy? And our gift back to our good maker is living our lives as beautifully as possible and making space for others to live out that beauty. I think, I mean, to your question, I think one of the things that we owe ourselves a world in which we can give people that space to create beautiful things. And also don't force people into model that in order for them to be seen as successful or to look comfortably requires them buying into capitalism full-blown, right?

And so, I think it's a question of making space and defining success differently from a success perspective. I think it's also going back to your point earlier, what do we owe the artists? I think in many ways, we owe them credit for our happiness.

Chris:

I was asking the other way around what do artists owe everybody else?

Darren Isom:

And I'll end on this point. I promise. We say in the social sector that you measure what you value, right? And I think that we don't value happiness and community enough to really measure it in a way that's meaningful and powerful. And if we could measure that differently, I can give us different paths to what we're building.

Gilane Tawadros:

Thank you all very much. This discussion aimed to change the conversation about the value of culture away from economic value and other simple metrics to an understanding of how culture fuels our imaginations and touches our souls. Mariana argued powerfully for culture as a public good. Alvaro articulated eloquently the transformative power of culture. And Darren poignantly invited us to think about how culture is embedded in our everyday lives. How can we create a different and a better world without first imagining what a different world looks and feels like? How can we connect with other people if we don't understand them or are not moved in some way by their experiences?

In the past few years, the world has lurched from one global crisis to another. The banking crisis, the pandemic, and now a potentially long and far-reaching war in the Middle East that could have long-term adverse consequences for the global economy. We've entered the age of permacrisis where stability and predictability, in the global North at least, have been replaced with uncertainty and unpredictability. With so many challenges and uncertainties in the world, it's valid to ask why we should concern ourselves with the value of culture, which is surely dwarfed by these macro events.

Some people would have us believe that culture is a prerogative of a wealthy metropolitan elite who can afford to indulge in it. But I would argue that culture is a necessity that we can't afford not to have in our lives. As James Baldwin, the African-American writer and novelist put it, "Life is more important than art. That's why art is important." What Baldwin is saying is that we all need the basic necessities of life, food, shelter, clothing. But if that's all we have, then we're merely existing, not living. I keep returning to this quote from Baldwin because it's such a concise and powerful statement of the vital importance of art being an integral part of our everyday lives.

Culture holds the key to how we navigate our age of permacrisis. Without imagination, which is the essential renewable fuel of the arts, nothing new can emerge in the world. Ideas, products, ways of doing things. Without the critical challenge of contemporary forms of culture, which provoke new ways of seeing and understanding, we can't build collective solutions to shared challenges. Without embracing different perspectives and viewpoints, which often emerge through art, music, and literature, our democracy will be threatened. Culture is not a luxury in these difficult times. It's an absolute necessity.

Darren Isom:

And that's a wrap for today's Dreaming in Color conversation. Before we go, one quick look ahead. If you enjoyed today's conversation, consider the taste of what's to come. Our next season of Dreaming in Color will be devoted entirely to arts, culture, and the beautiful transformative futures that emerge when we invest in imagination. I can't wait to share those conversations with you in 2027. In the meantime, our Dreaming in Color live series continues with several more remarkable conversations coming your way before the end of the year, and I hope you'll join us for each of them. If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.

A deep thank you as well to Gilane Tawadros and the team at Whitechapel Gallery for helping shape and host this evening. Your leadership and care made this gathering a very beautiful one. Dreaming in Color Live's a Bridgespan supported production created in partnership with content allies. A special thank you to our show producer, Denise Sabas, our associate producer, Sakina Khan, and our onboarding producer, Claudine Fleury, our videographer, Lowell Thomas, and audio mixer, Randy Sinclair. And as always, a special thank you to my Bridgespan production partner, the ever brilliant Cora Daniels, my partner in good trouble and in all the dreaming that happens behind the scenes. Thank you for listening.