Rob Pruitt

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Portrait by Terry Richardson

interview by GLENN O’BRIEN
portrait by TERRY RICHARDSON

I visited ROB PRUITT’s studio in Brooklyn on the first really cold day in the Fall of 2009. It was just a few weeks after I worked with Rob at the Guggenheim Museum on the first annual Rob Pruitt Art Awards Show, the art world’s first-ever awards ceremony, which Rob rather miraculously pulled off in high-style. I signed on as the announcer — or, as he put it, The Voice of God. I became involved in the ceremony thinking it would be a spoof on the art world and on award shows in general. Oddly enough, it turned out to be a transcendental moment that fulfilled both missions while achieving something more. Somehow the award ceremony altered the world it both teased and honored. I’ve always been a big fan of Rob’s work, which is SMART, COOL, FUNNY, POLITICAL, AND REMARKABLY HUMANE. Rob is also a fun guy. I agreed to visit his studio in Brooklyn because I could drive there. I parked in the enormous parking lot of a Home Depot store without being caught. Rob’s studio was almost empty because he was between projects. His assistant wasn’t there and neither of us could figure out how to turn on the heat, so we huddled around his Powerbook and he showed me pages from his forthcoming monograph.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Did you do solo work before you formed Pruitt-Early with Jack Early?
ROB PRUITT — No, Pruitt-Early was the beginning of my career. Before that it was just art-school work. Nothing was ever exhibited as Rob Pruitt. Pruitt-Early was my first experience of showing work.

GLENN O’BRIEN — How did Pruitt-Early come into being?
ROB PRUITT — Jack Early and I met on the first day of art school, at orientation, and it was love at first sight.

GLENN O’BRIEN — That’ll orient you.
ROB PRUITT — It started as a romance. Growing up gay in the suburbs in the late ’70s-early ’80s was still like a Norman Rockwell experience, like taking dates to proms. Things like that didn’t really exist for me. Leaving home and going away to art school was completely liberating. So it sort of made sense to fall in love on my very first day of school — without doing any shopping first. It was a release of all of my pent-up need for intimacy. We were together for about ten years, all through college and then five years of working together as Pruitt-Early. Our artistic collaboration wasn’t something I was interested in specifically. It was a way to be together publicly, as a couple. We could’ve taken it further and turned it into a didactic political statement. But back then I didn’t see that as a possibility. I wasn’t educated that way. I just I wanted to present the two of us as a couple, and not hide it. Toward the end of Pruitt-Early we did a performance where we got married in a nightclub, Club USA, which wasn’t around very long.

GLENN O’BRIEN — I remember that.
ROB PRUITT — It was under the guise of a fashion show. The fashion designers Jysp Johnson asked us if we’d be interested in orchestrating a show with them. We came up with Pruitt and Early’s wedding: two grooms — us — and an entire wedding party wearing their clothes. They made these sort of futuristic Edwardian powder-blue polyester morning coats that were synthetic and cartoony.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Did Pruitt-Early’s work relationship end when your personal relationship ended?
ROB PRUITT — Yeah, it all sort of imploded at the same time. Up until then things had gone like gangbusters. We didn’t really experience the hardships that most young artists go through when they start exhibiting — like being in a lot of group shows and trying to befriend a dealer who likes your work. We fell into an exhibition career almost immediately when we started showing with Lisa Spellman at 303 Gallery. She was young and worked hard to get us noticed and it clicked. Nothing could have been better. Within a year we were showing in Germany and Los Angeles and getting invitations from small museums to exhibit.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Did you have a division of labor, like, he’s good at that and I’m good at this?
ROB PRUITT — Yes. There was a very clear delineation of tasks. But we’ve become so distant since our collaboration ended in 1992 that I feel awkward talking about it.

Safefas (purple), 2 parts- each 24 x 18 inches,<br />Glitter, enamel paint on canvas, 2002

GLENN O’BRIEN — It’s always embarrassing for the interviewee, so you end up making personal confessions in order to make the interviewee more comfortable.
ROB PRUITT — I wonder if that’s what prosecuting attorneys do.

GLENN O’BRIEN — I don’t think they give you that job if you have feelings.
ROB PRUITT — Recently there was a swirl of publicity about Pruitt-Early because the “Red, Black, Green, Red, White, and Blue Project,” which was shown at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1992, was just shown again at the Tate Modern in London, after being in storage for years. Things about Jack Early were written in the press that he thought were unfair — that he lives in a welfare hotel or something, which he doesn’t. That information didn’t come from me, but he thought it did. Honestly, I didn’t know what he was doing, but having to deal with it again was difficult.

GLENN O’BRIEN — It probably would’ve been a lot worse if you really had actually gotten married.
ROB PRUITT — Right. [Laughs]

GLENN O’BRIEN — Why was it so controversial?
ROB PRUITT — Well, our work had always been softly political. The “Artwork for Teenage Boys” project that Jack and I showed with Lisa Spellman was our way of painting a portrait of a white-male-dominated culture and, in particular, showing the kind of kids that would beat us up in high school and ridicule us for being gay. That stuff still exists, and high school is a microcosm of the grownup world. Bullies represent adult culture in a bigger and more powerful way. Society fosters this behavior in ephemera like misogynistic, homophobic t-shirts; car stickers pasted up on school lockers; song lyrics; and so on. We felt it was an interesting subject for an art project two people could author. Art is usually about personal thoughts, personal identity, and personal esthetic. Our collaboration happened organically. We were sharing the same studio and the same materials and we appreciated each other’s working methods and output. So we created something that was feasible to author together, which came out of the shared experience of being the gay guys who were picked on in high school and who shared a real love for the pop art they’d grown up with as kids in the ’60s and in subsequent art movements. Old Pruitt-Early work is like decorated minimalism with pop art influences. But it’s also based on mathematics and systems analysis.

GLENN O’BRIEN — You said that the end of your collaboration and your relationship was controversial.
ROB PRUITT — Yes, because they both ended with the Castelli show. Before the Castelli show we depicted the kids that picked on us and we called that work “Artwork for Teenage Boys.” It wasn’t just teenage boys, but a particular group we saw as the enemy. Then we shifted gears and made the “Red, Black, Green, Red, White, and Blue Project,” which was about Black culture in America. It was a daunting thing to undertake: a new project that had a deadline. The exhibition was to open in about seven months. But, you know, things were rolling so well for us that nothing really seemed impossible. So, rather than approach the subject theoretically, we thought of making a sampler of Black culture, we being consumers of that culture ourselves — of its music, film, sports, and politics. I was really into Black women’s literature. We were interested in African-American culture. We felt like we had had parallel experiences growing up gay, even though we were privileged white males. Our liberties and rights were compromised because of the way we were born. But we probably bit off more than we could chew. Part of the project dealt with the fact that racism still exists, but it ended up being construed by the critical press as being racist itself — maybe because you can’t really mix together different individuals from disparate fields, like those of art and politics and sports, and then just because of their skin color think of them as a community. Plus, it was presented in 1992, right in the middle of all the political correctness and identity issues going on in art. I’ve had more than 15 years to try and figure out exactly what happened.

GLENN O’BRIEN — That’s a lot of post-mortem.
ROB PRUITT — The first five of them I was in denial, because it was so traumatizing personally. I just wanted to run away. We’d gained entry into the art world, which is so hard to crack, and which I always wanted to be a part of. To be suddenly shut out was traumatic and daunting.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Did you feel that you were right? Did you ever think that maybe they were right — that maybe you didn’t have the right to make that kind of work?
ROB PRUITT — I’m able to think both things at the same time. But that’s what makes a project exciting: when you might not have the right to do something, but you do it anyway. I don’t think making people feel bad or hurt­ing people’s feelings is ever a good thing, so I have a bit of guilt. It was like a car crash. It happened so quickly that it’s impossible to understand all the details that streamed by. I mean, the work still exists, but work can’t really exist purely on its own. You can’t really extract it from the context. We could uncrate one of those pieces and put it here now and say it’s just a poster of Michael Jackson combined with a second poster of a woman with an Afro from the ’60s. We might ask why it offended people so much. That’s where it starts to get confusing, certainly in my own mind. It isn’t just the things themselves. They’re relics of a moment. I’m not sure that anyone can ever really know for sure what happened. Many things happened. Maybe the show was a collection of things. Maybe it wasn’t bad art, and maybe it wasn’t racist. Maybe it was racist and done too hastily and seen as being exploitative. Maybe all of these things created the storm.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Was it the thing that split you guys up?
ROB PRUITT — Yeah. I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that I didn’t want to repeat what happened to my parents. They were each other’s first experience of a relationship. I was born when my parents were still teenagers and I’m not sure they would have married each other if they’d waited. But they stuck it out. I was born and then my sister was. They struggled on many levels, maturing together, always having financial difficulties. So at a certain point I thought I’d done the same thing my mother and father had done. I’d met this person right after high school and we’d been together for seven or eight years, and it seemed impossible to stop the train — even if I wanted to get off for just a weekend to see what else was out in the world. So on the one hand I was happy that the show ended in catastrophe. It gave me the opportunity to clean house and get out.

Ahh, Ahh (purple), 2 parts- each 24 x 18 inches,<br />Glitter, enamel paint on canvas, 2003

GLENN O’BRIEN — I got married when I was 20. It was really stupid. I remember thinking, “My life is over.”
ROB PRUITT — In a way, that’s what I thought. I was signing my name to art I wasn’t sure about. Not just the Castelli show. Our first show at 303 happened when I was 25, and when the Castelli show happened I was 27. I needed more time and distance. I mean, the checks were rolling in, but it wasn’t entirely satisfying.

GLENN O’BRIEN — In the visual arts, collaboration isn’t so common. But look at Jagger and Richards, or Lennon and McCartney — most of their songs were written by one guy or the other, not by both of them. The deal was to put both names on it. I mean you guys were showing as one person, almost like a corporation. When Warhol and Basquiat collaborated the resulting works didn’t sell — and they’re still worth less than an individual Warhol or Basquiat. That kind of collaboration is discouraged. It violates the canon.
ROB PRUITT — That’s endlessly fascinating to me. I always play games in my head about whether or not collaborations can rise above the norm and thereby prove it false. I don’t think they can, but I can never come up with a reason why.

GLENN O’BRIEN — It’s marketing. In areas like songwriting and film-script writing it works very well. Maybe it would be healthy for art.
ROB PRUITT — In art people fetishize the angst-driven existence, which can only be brought to you by a solitary soul. When people at a museum stand before an abstract painting by, say, Franz Kline, they like to know that one person was responsible for it.

GLENN O’BRIEN — The cult of genius.
ROB PRUITT — Exactly. I saw it in my development from a young artist to a middle-aged one. I started out working at the Sonnabend Gallery, which showed lots of artists I loved. Some of them would downplay the number of studio assistants they used.
I think because they didn’t want to dispel the magical idea that they were responsible for every bit of what you looked at.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Andy Warhol’s genius was to glamorize his assistants, like Gerard Malanga, with his shirt off, doing silk-screens. The Factory wasn’t corporate art, but it modified the image of the artist.
ROB PRUITT — But it was a Hollywood version of the truth.

GLENN O’BRIEN — What do you mean?
ROB PRUITT — Gerard’s very good looking and we all have images in our mind of him working in the studio, which was probably not exactly the way the studio looked every day. There were probably other assistants who weren’t so photogenic and who didn’t become part of the known cast of characters.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Andy was aware of that.   He sort of cast the factory, with Billy Name and Stephen Shore taking pictures. Looks counted. But still, there aren’t so many other teams, other than Fischli and Weiss, and Komar and Melamid.
ROB PRUITT — There’s Gilbert and George. And now there’s Bernadette Corporation’s Reena Spaulings, and the collaboration of Guyton and Walker, which is a secondary project that addresses the market in a different way.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Are you saying it’s the market that defines the roles?
ROB PRUITT — I think so. Artists pretend that art is above that kind of attention but still keep an eye on trends, art fairs, and all aspects of the market.

GLENN O’BRIEN — It’s funny — you rarely see an artist at an art fair.
ROB PRUITT — I haven’t been to many art fairs. But they’re really interesting. When I was younger many of the most serious galleries wouldn’t participate in them. Now that’s totally flipped. Galleries plan fairs a year in advance and bring their best work to them. It’s really useful to walk around a fair. You can see a year’s worth of activity in an afternoon. It’s better than walking around in Chelsea.

GLENN O’BRIEN — If you go to Miami every year, you notice how it changes from one year to the next. Last year a bunch of Kosuths were up for sale, ones I’d never seen in Miami. And the Warhol and Basquiat count fluctuates wildly. Certain things are suddenly unloaded, it seems, as if they’re peaking and won’t be as valuable the next year.
ROB PRUITT — Or they’re trying to make a new market.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Last year in Miami an Alfred Leslie painting caught my eye. It looked really powerful, but a lot of other blue-chip works were suddenly hard to believe in. I think that with the economy now in flux people want the patina of labor. They don’t want things that look easily done.
ROB PRUITT — With art, unless someone is a virtuoso it’s often a case of the emperor’s new clothes. But it’s interesting when a work you were really interested in 15 years before no longer has a life force.

GLENN O’BRIEN — That’s especially true of artists whose work seems too easy.
ROB PRUITT — Explain Peter Doig to me. Why is this one man’s work so much more valuable than everyone else’s combined? How did that happen?

GLENN O’BRIEN — I don’t know. He is a great painter, but he’s not four times greater than anyone else. I think it’s just about being hot. It always seems like a conspiracy that the artist himself isn’t in on.
ROB PRUITT — I’m very cynical. I think about the people behind the scenes pulling strings.

Go Away, Go Away (purple), 2 parts- each<br />24 x 18 inches,Glitter, enamel paint on canvas, 2003

GLENN O’BRIEN — Strings are always being pulled. But the interesting thing about the art market is that it’s the one market that governments will never be able to figure out how to regulate. It’s inscrutable. The mechanics of the market are so ephemeral. What could the SEC or anyone do? I don’t think they could ever figure out how it’s manipulated or how they could control it, even if it were legit. Certain big collectors try to corner the market of an artist. In a way, it’d be a lot easier to corner George Condo’s market than it was for the Hunt Brothers to corner the silver market in 1986, you know? I don’t know if pricing is always deliberate, or if there’s a cabal of collectors…
ROB PRUITT — I only mention Doig because we show at the same gallery and because at the recent auctions he broke his own record, which had already been quite high. I also like the paintings and I think he’s a good artist. It seems so arbitrary. Why these painting? Why this person? I mean, I’ve never heard anyone say that Peter Doig is their favorite artist. I don’t see students following his lead. I mean, I think that he’s really good, but I’m puzzled by it all.

GLENN O’BRIEN — In times like these it’s better for an artist to look like he’s got talent, that he’s got skill. In this kind of economy there’s a nostalgia for people who can draw, and for things that look like art.
ROB PRUITT — Right — conservatism. I better make a note of that.

GLENN O’BRIEN — I think it has something to do with John Currin’s popularity. I love what John does, and I wish I could afford his work, but I think that it’s all very of-its-time. People might look at installation art or conceptual art and wonder what it’s about. Whereas if your painting looks like art, no one’s going to say it’s not art.
ROB PRUITT — Most of the people looking at art can’t do it. It’s like listening to a violin virtu­oso — you’re awed by things you can’t do.

GLENN O’BRIEN — I confess that I like to know an artist can draw if he has to. And then, of course, he can go and put basketballs in a tank.
ROB PRUITT — That’s why it worked so well with Andy Warhol. He was technically proficient. So even when he was slopping paint on with a sponge mop, there was the element of finesse it takes to render form beautifully.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Did you see Mike Kelley’s new show of paintings?
ROB PRUITT — No. What are they like?

GLENN O’BRIEN — They’re kind of horror-humor. Very PG-13. Not for the little kids. I don’t think he ever had a show of his paintings before. It’s interesting to see a side of him not really seen before. Although I wonder how much of the work will end up in a crate somewhere. I felt the same way when I saw Damien Hirst’s paintings of people in medical or pharmaceutical labs. Is one of those paintings ever going to hang over somebody’s dining table in the Hamptons? Or is it going to stay in a crate for most of its life, like something in a safety deposit box?
ROB PRUITT — I don’t believe he really painted those pictures himself.

GLENN O’BRIEN — But it doesn’t matter. It’s also hard to believe that Mike Kelley did the huge amount of work necessary for his show. I guess it’s possible. He’s a worker. He must have assistants. Do you have assistants?
ROB PRUITT — I hire them when I need them. I basically do everything myself, but I don’t really have a high level of skill. Like most people today I suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. So I’ll never have the self-discipline of John Currin, and commit three months to one painting. I’m not sure how long they take him, but I’m sure it’s a very long time.

GLENN O’BRIEN — They’re novel-length.
ROB PRUITT — I’m 45 years old, but I always think there’ll be enough time for that sort of thing in the future. So I do whatever I’m interested in at the moment and basically I always do it myself.

Purple Moonlight Bamboo, 24 x 18 inches, Glitter, enamel paint on canvas, 2002

GLENN O’BRIEN — Do you prefer to work alone?
ROB PRUITT — No, I like to have another person in the room, so I can at least turn to them and say, “Look what I just did! Isn’t this great?” — even if I’m paying them to be there, because it’s very lonely, and very hard.

GLENN O’BRIEN — I had an assistant for 20 years. Then I went and worked in an office for a year and a half, and now I’m back working at home, mostly alone. Last week I was thinking, “This is driving me crazy!” So I go to Whole Foods in the afternoon just to see people. I think my best work was probably written in a kitchen while somebody was cooking. What about your new book? Did you like all the comments you solicited for it? Or did some of them irritate you?
ROB PRUITT — I expected there would be a wider variety. I thought some of them would be more critical. I think that when you give people a task like that they want to be polite — even if you specifically state in the initial invitation letter that no one is obliged to be kind, that they can be critical. That was the one thing that disappointed me. I thought that it would have been truer, as well as a better read, to juxtapose the glowing remarks with critical ones.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Here’s what Jerry Saltz said: “Rob Pruitt is living proof that the first axiom of the art world has never counted anyone out.”
ROB PRUITT — That’s neither kind nor unkind. I don’t know what it is. It’s safe, under the guise of being flippant. What do you think of that comment? It really reduces art to a kind of horse race.

GLENN O’BRIEN — I guess that’s what critics do: they handicap. I used to write reviews for Artforum. Then one day, after I’d written a critical one, I thought, “I can’t do this anymore.” I realized the review had more to do with how I was feeling that day than about the work. I thought maybe I was wrong. I actually apologized to the artist, about ten years later.
ROB PRUITT — I wonder if that happens a lot. No one has ever apologized to me. And I’ve certainly gotten my share of bad reviews.

GLENN O’BRIEN — How did you come up with the idea of The Art Awards show you staged at the Guggenheim? Or was it really not your idea?
ROB PRUITT — [Laughs] No, The Art Awards was my idea. I don’t know how to give a short answer. It was born out of the dust that settled after Pruitt-Early’s demise. I wanted to continue as a solo artist, and be responsible for all of the work. Put my signature on things I had done, things I believed in, and it would just be me. It was a struggle to get back. I’ve always thought that being able to exhibit in the art world was a privilege that should be earned. Because I had to fight so hard to do it again, it led to this broader notion that it’s a community that has a government and laws. I’d done a few projects that were similar to The Art Awards, like The Flea Markets, which were about being a part of a community and representing the community as an art show. In a way I think it’s better than a group show because it allows for so much personal interpretation, self-expression, immediacy, and improvisation. When I organized a flea market, it was open-ended. I let everyone I invited know they could bring their friends along. Everyone got the same size table and if you wanted to show your own art you could. If you just wanted to clean out your closet and sell things in the traditional flea market way you could do that. You could make multiples or do a performance. You could do whatever you liked under the guise of being at a flea market. I’ve really enjoyed the success of them. It really does bring together the community. People who participate get very excited, standing at their table, representing their things to the public — without going through an art dealer. They’ll talk to anyone who comes to their tables about what they’re selling. When I thought of having The Art Awards, I again started thinking about the art community and the power structure and how artists really speak through their work. You hang it on the wall and what happens to it is up to other people, whether it’s going to be included in the next Whitney Biennial or it’s going to end up on the cover of Artforum. With The Art Awards I thought I could set up a democratic process, with an academy of voters. I showed things made in the past year that people were excited about. They were then presented in the format of an awards show, which allowed the recipient of the award to stand up and interface with the public. This allowed them to include their personalities as well as their artistic persona. Not all contemporary artists have a public persona. Most of them just have their work, which speaks for itself.

GLENN O’BRIEN — The way I saw it, you were making public, or externalizing, a process that goes on naturally but is not really public. You were taking a process of approval and making it public, which makes fun of it a little bit — even though it also fulfills a natural process of approval. But it also makes you think about what the art world is and who is in it. Sometimes I think artists aren’t really part of the art world. There’s a sort of community of artists and then you have the art world, which includes all the people who deal with the art: those who sell it, those who collect it, those who write about it — all the people who make a living off of art without actually making it. Sometimes it seems like artists don’t have enough power in the art world. Do you know what I mean?
ROB PRUITT — Yes, I do. I agree with every­thing you just said, and it was a big part of my intention. It wasn’t necessarily trying to get more power for myself. I wanted to shake up the art world a little bit and get people to think about how they participate in it. It was fun to see which people had adverse reactions to the project before it even took place. Curators, rather than artists, were the most critical of the project. I don’t know that I encountered any dealers that thought that it was a horrible idea. Maybe a handful of artists thought it was silly. But it was mostly curators who thought I was messing with their stations.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Well, in a way, curators are the guardians of seriousness.
ROB PRUITT — That’s true. But why is it true? Do they worry that people will think none of it is all that serious, and then the whole thing will fall apart?

GLENN O’BRIEN — I don’t think it would. Although that relates to how I feel about art writing. It’s considered something that has to be private, elitist, and written in a way that the guy on the street can’t understand it. It’s like religion in that way. It’s a mystery — I’m sorry if we get it and you don’t. Do you know Thom Browne?
ROB PRUITT — He’s a suit designer, right?

GLENN O’BRIEN — Yeah. I’ve gone to his fashion shows. He’ll do things like have a guy come out wearing a suit jacket with a bridal skirt made out of a goose-down ski jacket. When I see it I just have to laugh. But you see all the fashion professionals taking notes and not smiling. They’re so involved in how that world functions that they can’t see the joke.
ROB PRUITT — What does Thom Browne think he’s doing? Does he think he’s pushing the limits of fashion and therefore propelling it forward? Looking at it cynically, he could be producing a sort of false avant-garde in order to sell the traditional parts of the collection — because if you don’t generate press, then you don’t sell suits. The bridal skirt probably wasn’t made to be sold.

GLENN O’BRIEN — But it does make him laugh, and I think he’d be the first to admit it. In a way, he’s also making fun of the system, because every fashion show is like that — 80% of the stuff will never be in a store. It’s all designed to attract attention. He reveals that.
ROB PRUITT — At my awards show, Ryan Trecartin won the Newcomer of the Year award. He’s from Los Angeles and was in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus show at The New Museum. I’ve never seen any of his videos. But seeing Ryan get up on stage and infuse his award-winning moment with some humanity — like at any other award show — was a cross-pollination of industry rituals. The art world is generally so polite and so guarded it’s hard to know when an emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Everything written about a work of art, or about a body of work, is written by professional art writers, not by artists themselves. The encoded language of art criticism is designed to prop it up or to tear it down. So I think that the structure of The Art Awards was an interesting theater piece for taking our world and infusing it with some humanity. We’re all just people. We all show up at the office every day. Some of us hate each other. Some of us love each other. The awards may have a sort of one-liner, because the art world’s the last place you expect to see an awards show, if only because it’s so elitist. But I think that it worked. In the end people were rooting for their favorite nominees. When Mary Heilmann won there was a huge swell of emotion and a big round of applause, and she gave a very emotional acceptance speech. So what was it all for? It wasn’t for the crappy trophy that I made out of an ice bucket. That’s meaningless. I think it was because her community voted for her and that meant something.

GLENN O’BRIEN — Is there something you would change, that you think didn’t work? Do you have a different plan for the next one?
ROB PRUITT — There is no plan. And I don’t know if there will be a second one. This may sound unbelievable or even dishonest, but I really didn’t intend to be such a provocateur. I just thought it would be a break from the serious day-to-day art world. So if it were to happen again, I would want it to be more fun. The Guggenheim atrium only holds 300 people. I’d like a thousand people to come, for more people to be involved so that it can take an even more unpredictable course, one that no one expects. But I do see it as a community-strengthening endeavor. There was a lot of positive and heartfelt emotion in the room that night. It was a bit clunky because it was an enormous undertaking — there were so many details to attend to. It ran a little long and some parts of it were inaudible.