Barbara Earl Thomas is an artist, a writer, a speaker, a former head of the city's arts office, a former museum director, the daughter Jacob Lawrence and Gwen Knight never had, and a woman who can, operating in her modest and plainspoken way behind the scenes, raise a few hundred thousand dollars for a good cause. (Ask her how she does that last thing, and she'll insist, in her Southern way, that she really could not tell you. She seems as surprised as you are.)

She is, in other words, a figure, a personage. She's even a little bit of a sage, having earned the respect of younger artists. Last year, C. Davida Ingram invited her to be part of a group exhibition of mostly younger artists. Ingram asked each artist in stereoTYPE to create a work of art that incorporated images and text. Thomas contributed two short fictional stories—a chanted series of responses to cluelessly racist comments, and a story taken from her own history in which a young girl learns she is not welcome to play in a group because of her dark skin—presented on a wall above a small group of ornate lanterns made of cut white paper, lit almost to appear as if they were on fire.

But she wasn't satisfied with what she'd made.

So when Ingram asked Thomas, along with a few other artists from stereoTYPE, to join her in her Northwest African American Museum solo show, Thomas created an entirely new installation and added a new story.

The new installation feels more hopeful and more personal. It's lighter—literally, its pedestal is a light table. The new story, Lula Mae Is A Lullaby, is about feeling safe, protected, and beautiful.

What changed? Thomas talked to me about her art and about watching the changing conversation on race in Seattle unfold, standing in front of the installation at NAAM. She started out talking about a Facebook debate over which baby is cuter, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's, or Beyonce and Jay-Z's.

BET: All these discussions about if Beyonce’s baby is cuter than Kardashian’s baby... that’s a big conversation I’ve been following on Facebook. I said, wow, are we really having this discussion? And people don’t even understand that the reason they are responding to the fact that this baby’s mixed, and has brought out all the positive of what we are okay with, while Beyonce may look the way she is, but she’s actually black, so two black people, they had a black baby.

So what I’m trying to do with my work is just recast the story, and find the other parts of it.

What I say here [pointing to the text on the wall]—this really did happen, this little girl came out and she said she couldn’t play with me. I’m like, you know, I actually at that point didn’t have enough information to be upset, except that I put it somewhere. I can’t say that it didn’t affect me because here I am, 45 years later, I’m writing about it. It must have meant something. And this exhibition gave me the opportunity to remember that...

And then I wrote this thing about Lula Mae, that’s my mom, she used to crochet, crochet, crochet, so we’d have these big doily things on all the lamps, the tabletops, everything. She’d put it on that stiff starch and pull it up and make it all lacy, so our little High Point house was just full with crochet doo-dahs.

JG: You say, “You crochet doilies in mad waves of netting string that undulate under lamps, over tabletops, across chair backs, all the way to the couch. For my highwire act they catch me up and cover every surface. You are the smartest, bravest, most beautiful little girl in the world. I live in a forest in the light of your fiction, and believe.”

BET: I do. It’s true. Because I never was pretty. I was talking to a writer, and she said one of the things I had to get used to when I got older, she said, "I really was pretty, and I lost that." And I said, I never had that. I looked interesting. I was not ugly. ...And I wasn’t the lightest. Like the guy said, “If you were just one shade lighter, you would’ve made it.” I would have passed, I guess, the brown paper bag test. I would have been light enough to be considered special, or at least in the group where you’re raised up a little bit because of that. So that’s how I responded to [the theme of] “stereotype.” And even some of this is about being a woman, you know being a girl, issues of beauty. It’s like you said when you were pregnant, people were like, “God, you look good for as thin as you are” or “God, you look good for as big as you are,” and you were like, would you stop commenting on whether I am big or whether I am small? I’m just inside these hormones!

JG: It's a predicament.

BET: It’s a situation. It’s a situation.

JG: You've talked about that you’re living for some kind of future that you can’t understand yet, but it’s to be worked toward.

BET: Toward, mm-hmm.

JG: And you and I have talked about conversations around race in Seattle, what they're working toward.

BET: Yes. The reason I’m so honored to be part of this show with people a generation younger than me, and how they’re thinking about it is that, to me, it provides a little ballast. I look, and It’s like, yeah, you can do that, because I’ve been around, and now I don’t have to do that, because I’m going to this next place where I just talk about being, and letting other people pick out what parts they want to decide are my practice. You standin’ in my practice.

JG: The museum.

BET: Yeah. I worked with so many people and we got this thing done so that Davida and francine [j. harris] and everyone can be here. That’s all it was about. It’s not anything until the work shows up, that makes the museum.

So I get to add my story to their conceptual framework, and it makes me end the day today, I’m right here, and I feel so grateful, because It’s not like I’m doing things about yesterday, I’m just right here in today. And I think it’s pushed my work. Every time I have an assignment, it pushes me. You can see this has come from those prints, and from the prints I went to the glass with the sandblasting, and then the glass started to talk to the paper—I was just standing in there, I said oh, something can happen. And I said, let’s see what can happen, and then came 75 hours just cutting.

JG: To make this piece?

BET: Yeah, just cutting. At one point I thought I should draw it and cut it, and then I just thought, no, you just have to cut it, you can’t be drawing.

JG: This is freehand.

BET: Yeah, you just have to look up and say what do you want and how you gonna get it, how you gonna get there.

JG: Is it X-acto knife?

BET: Mm-hmm.

JG: And were you working on one of those self-healing surfaces?

BET: Oh, I just—girl, I have a table, a piece of plywood. And I was working it out as I went, like this will work better, no this will work better, moving it around until I figured out how to do it. And there’s that woman who makes all those lacy paper cut things—

JG: Celeste Cooning.

BET: And I said well that’s interesting, I like that, but I need to have my images, so I worked around to figure out how I could get my images in there. I thought, you just have to be brave. Get the knife and cut.

JG: There's fire and water here, final days stuff.

BET: Yeah, and this person has fire coming out of her ear.

JG: You added these wings.

BET: I love these, I was so happy with these. And the shadow. Actually the way I wanted to do it is I wanted to cover the whole ceiling, I just didn’t have time. So when I do the show over in Bainbridge, I’m going to make enough stuff so that these things will be very large and cover a whole scene.

JG: Bainbridge Island Museum of Art? When will that be?

BET: Yes, in October.

JG: Solo show?

BET: Mm-hmm. I’ve been so excited because it’s been moving so fast, the communication between the work: doing the glass, and then the glass saying do the paper, and the paper say do whatever, and this all came from the assignment of do those lanterns for SAM.

JG: What year was that?

BET: I did it 2013 and 2014. And when I did this one at the Sharon gallery [formerly LxWxH in Georgetown], I was trying to put the little lights in them, and [later] I was in my studio I said no, I gotta figure out this light thing. I gotta figure out how to make the celestial here.

JG: Is this a light table?

BET: Yeah. I grew up with my mother. My mother worked in Lerner’s dress shop and she was a window dresser.

JG: Where was that, downtown?

BET: I mean it was all over the country, it was Lerner’s. You’d go in there and there would be the mannequins and they wouldn’t have heads or arms, and so I’d go back and play among all the heads and the pieces.

She ironed everything. She had a little straight bracelet with pins in it. So she would iron and pin so that she could make it look like the wind was pulling the dress back. They had to make things up because it wasn’t really a high-end store, it was kind of middle. Your mom wouldn’t be going to Nordstrom, she’d be going to Lerner’s. You get the 5.99 and the Day of the Week underwear.

JG: Oh yeah, I did get the Day of the Week underwear.

BET: You’d put on Thursday, it’s Monday. [laughing]

JG: There's this predicament side but then there's this joy side.

BET: Then the thing that’s interesting to me is it’s all fiction. That’s what human beings do, we create out of our daily lives a through-line and a storyline that is the one that we want, and how we want the facts to link up. And anybody else looking at these separate, today I got up and I drank my coffee and I did whatever, they might not necessarily make the same story out of it as you make out of it. So our job is to make up the story that we want to have read. That gives texture to whatever the group story is. And I think that’s as important as active resistance.

JG: Is writing different stories.

BET: Is writing a story that’s making sure that we are full-fledged people with all kinds of shades of existence and emotional responses and ways of seeing the world. I think that is so important, and I think what we should be working toward in all of these movements is all of us to put ourselves out of business.

It may not happen for hundreds of years but the goal is, okay, to put that to bed, put that to bed, so that you can see what the next thing is that’s a higher level. Not to say that there won’t be a reason to have an African American museum but there’ll be a different reason. And that I think is what it’s about. And I know my work is a little less, I don’t know, I feel like when people look at my work and go, what’s your tough stance? I says, you know, I’m my tough stance. And I think that the work has its other place, I think these stories have their place.

JG: Ultimately does it feel like this renewed conversation about race, which you've said you sometimes find to be not entirely productive, is helpful?

BET: Whether people feel it or not, I think things have gotten better. The quality of the conversation has risen and I am thankful for that. I mean, some horrible things are happening, that does not erase that. But the quality of the conversation, when I can go to a show like, you know, Black Lives Matter, and see an array of people taking on the issue, whether I agree or don’t agree, they’re all righteously trying to figure out what is their part in it. So that it’s not just well, okay, black people, what’s wrong with you and how can we listen to you better—they’re the therapist and we’re the patient. That doesn’t work.

Someone said to me today, oh I was thinking about you today, I ran into a woman who said, she was a white woman artist friend, and the woman said, well, I just think it’s time for black people to be over it, because like the Asians…and I said don’t go there. I said here. Here are three books that she should read. I said Souls of Black Folk. Read that. Then, she can read The Miseducation of the Negro. Then she can read Isabel Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns. I said, if she is willing to read those three books, she will be able to understand why our situation is not one of oh, my, the potato famine, we gotta get out of here, gonna get on the boat and go to a better place. Or oh, Cultural Revolution, I mean, horrible, how do we get out of there and go with our families? It’s not the same. I said, so you need to read about that so that you understand why that 300 years of steerage is not totally washed from the—I mean, I have to read about it to try to understand it, because if I just tried to understand where we are from just my own education and didn’t read any of that, I’d think, well you know, shit, just work hard. You know, I work hard.

The mistake is trying to project from your own personal experience onto everyone around you. It’s no different from say, you know, white privilege. I have a certain amount of privilege. I’ve broken through certain kinds of barriers. It’s not like my story is everybody’s story. So I would like to offer whatever I can, say this is how I did it, it ain’t perfect. But I can’t say, well, look at me, what’s wrong wit' you? I just can’t do that. I just can’t do that.

I had a friend once, she died pretty young, she died at 40. We were in our 20s to 40 together. She said once you said something to me and it really, really hurt my feelings. I had taken her to the hospital, we were going back and forth, and she said to me, I just always wanted to tell you about it. And I said okay what was it, and I was working full-time and I was making artwork and I was just, you know, I’m a motor scooter when I have to be, and she was complaining I have kids, I have a job, and I just told her, work harder. And she said, you said that. I said, I was wrong. You have to know I was 23, or I was 26. I was speaking from this very limited kind of experience, and now I can say that there is a point at which your heart will burst. And so you work up to that and you stop. And so I made a mistake to say that to you.

I think part of my job is to just include the world in my experience, because I see you. And I want you to see me. I want to invite you in. And I want you to be truthful. And if you ain’t gonna be truthful? That’s what we owe each other. Just complete and utter truth. And then we can sort out the rest.