A few years ago, I was visiting friends on the East Coast when I found myself with a full day alone. I made up a plan for the day that included walking and hoping to happen upon something great, which is what can happen when you take the time to do things with intention. I visited gardens, boarded trains, and eventually ended up at a modern art museum.
I went inside and proceeded to go straight to the top floor—I always like to start at the top and work my way down. In fact, this is how I like to work through everything: Begin one hundred feet in the air and then move closer and closer until you’ve seen everything up close and far away.
On the top floor of this particular museum, there was a new exhibit featuring the rarely seen work of an integral modern artist of the twentieth century. Please excuse me if it seems I’m being vague, but the point isn’t the artist, exactly, it’s . . . well, the work is the point.
And, oh, the work.
At times large and graphically bold, other times small and black and white, the exhibition was a lesson in contrasts and cohesion. But I didn’t immediately understand that. When I first laid eyes on these paintings and sculptures, I didn’t know how to interpret them. I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing.
So, I looked and I looked and I kept looking.
I noticed that the painted lines didn’t just form trapezoids and squares, they were parts of something bigger, possibly the edge of something else. The lines led to a sort of horizon, acting as indicators that there was more out there, more to see, more to come.
In my mind, it seemed like somewhere past those painted horizons there could be a different version of me, standing in another museum, contemplating sightlines and endings and what lies on the other side of where you are.
By witnessing the lines and arrows pointing to the unknown, I was participating in the sort of endless, collaborative timeline that art can create. I was witnessing and becoming a part of a new history.
For the past year, a group of teenagers in the San Francisco Bay Area have been congregating in a basement classroom under Mc-Sweene/s Publishing to discuss storytelling and stories of all stripes, as well as what’s happening around the world and at home. What you’re holding is the product of those meetings.
A lot has happened this year, and you can see change happening in these pages, in unexpected, at times painful and startlingly beautiful ways.
I think the committee was working toward a horizon, toward some meeting point where they could pass or pick up a baton that could carry them to the other side of somewhere else.
It’s a big ask—asking people just barely out of their adolescence to consider more and more of themselves and of others, but, believe me, these teens were more than up to the task. I think most people are. If you’re reading this book, I bet you are, too.
Every week, the BANR committee showed up ready to work and ready to create something special for you, a monument to the year in America and where we were.
In our last meeting, Dasha Bulatova, our wonderful helper from San Francisco State University, transcribed our last conversation as a group. Our overlapping ideas crisscrossed into this paragraph:
It’s less of a drought. The bees got better. We found ten bumblebees in our house by the window just in the last week. It seems like the earth is repairing itself. In California they have new commissions for solar energy requirements for new buildings. Shrooms are now legal in Denver. “I grew as a person. That’s all I’ll say.”
Time passes and things change for the better, sometimes for the best. Even a little bit of time can reveal great changes.
Flip to the end of the book to read more about the committee and the work that 826 National enables us to do. It’s great work, and I’m so grateful we were able to look and look and look at our world and make something out of it. I’m so grateful you’re curious about what we found.
Anyway, I guess that’s all I’ll say, too.
Thanks for reading along with us. We hope you’ll enjoy the collection.
BEATRICE KILAT and the BANR Committee
June 2019