JUDY WOODRUFF: Next: an artistic
response to a divided society.

Jeffrey Brown returns and
takes us to New York for a look
at a recent day-long project

titled The Shape of Things.

JEFFREY BROWN: There was
music and movement, a full
day and night of art and talk.

MAN: Always question democracy.

The public event, titled The
Shape of Things, featured more
than 50 artists and thinkers

who engage social
issues in their work.

There were well-established
figures such as jazz pianist
Jason Moran and newer voices

like Kimberly Drew.

It was held at the historic
Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan,
built in 1880 to showcase and

honor military might, but
now an exhibition space for
visual and performing arts.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS, Artist:
How are artists responding?

How are artists maintaining a
level of dignity and hope and
progress and work in the face

of this devastating violence?

I want to know what
that looks like.

JEFFREY BROWN: It was
the brainchild of artist
Carrie Mae Weems, who
called this a convening.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS: This
brings together, I
think, an extraordinary
group of people who

are thinking deeply about the
moments in which we live and
are as concerned as I am about

addressing it.

And each of us has to
figure out how in our own
lives and in our own work.

JEFFREY BROWN: The 64 year-old
Weems is best known for her
photography and, through it,

her exploration of
history, race, and power.

We first spoke in 2014,
when she became the
first African-American
woman given a solo

exhibition at the prestigious
Guggenheim Museum.

Among the works on display,
the 1995 series From Here I
Saw What Happened and I Cried,

where Weems altered 19th century
photographs of slaves, and
the 1990 Kitchen Table series,

in which Weems herself is a
character in a set of carefully
constructed scenes from a

woman's life.

In recent years, she's taken
the aspect of performance
further, to a theater piece she

created called Grace Notes,
a response to the 2015 murder
of nine members of a black

church in Charleston,
South Carolina, by a
white supremacist.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:
What is violence?

How would you characterize it?

JEFFREY BROWN: For the armory
event, Weems set a theme for
the day, what she called the

history of violence.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS: How violence
disrupts and dislocates,
displaces, fragments not only

the self, the person,
but also the society.

JEFFREY BROWN: The
participants picked up on
that in a variety of ways.

ADAM FOSS, Former Prosecutor:
Today, there are 2.3 million
people are in jail and prison.

JEFFREY BROWN: Adam Foss, a
former prosecutor in Boston,
spoke on mass incarceration and

the need for criminal
justice reform.

ADAM FOSS: One in three
black men born today will
spend some time in prison.

JEFFREY BROWN: Navid
and Vassiliki Khonsari,
who've developed leading
video games, showed

a new virtual reality
experience to put people
in violent settings to
see how they'd respond.

And poet Aja Monet read her poem
called "The First Time" about
an interaction she witnessed

between her teenaged brother
and a police officer.

AJA MONET, Poet: I couldn't
undo all the hate that builds
watching the men you love cower,

watching the men you love
cower, bend, kneel to the scows
of overseers, all the bright

and magic that dims
the light, lowers the
bright and magic dims.

This police officer stopped
us and felt really entitled to
question us, interrogate us.

And I noticed the demeanor in
my brother change, and I noticed
how that made him feel and how

it made me feel to watch.

JEFFREY BROWN: The 30-year-old
Monet lives in Southern Florida
and has worked with Carrie

Mae Weems before.

AJA MONET: If Carrie asks
you, you don't say no.

You just say yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Another young
artist saying yes was John
Edmonds, who showed a series

of photographs of
young black men.

JOHN EDMONDS, Photographer:
There is a different
way of entering and
thinking about political

art, art that's not blatantly
about sort of sending an overt
message, but more so inviting

the viewer to kind of
contemplate on their
own sort of mind-set.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think that
an artist has a responsibility
today to address political

issues overtly?

JOHN EDMONDS: It's an artist's
responsibility to be mindful
of the political climate that

they're in, because art and
photographs and images, they
have a great amount of power.

JEFFREY BROWN: That climate
for the people here meant a
response to growing divisions

within the country.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS: For me,
Donald Trump has really brought
something so forward to bear

on us all.

Right?

He's brought forward very
clear ideas about what America
should and shouldn't be.

And it's for that reason I think
that he's been -- his election
has been absolutely remarkable

and necessary, because it lays
bare the clarity of the moment,
right, and how splintered the

country is and what people
are really fighting around.

JEFFREY BROWN: One thing I'm
wondering, though, today,
here, who is this for?

Are you worried that this
is more like preaching
to the choir here?

CARRIE MAE WEEMS: No,
no, because even when
we're grappling with
the same ideas, we don't

all think the same things.

We don't all believe
the same things.

For even the -- quote
-- "liberal," the sort
of progressive side,
they're grappling with

who they are in relationship
to this moment as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: But do you feel
-- has anything changed in
terms of your sense of you as an

artist, your responsibility?

CARRIE MAE WEEMS: No,
it's only deepened.

It's only deepened.

I do think that as I mature and
I age, I think more of creating
these spaces, of widening

the path, and being clear about
that, so that others can do
their work more easily in the

future.

JEFFREY BROWN: Weems says she
wants to build on the Shape
of Things project, in her own

work, and through
future collaborations
with other artists and
presenters who took part.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm
Jeffrey Brown at the Park
Avenue Armory in New York.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Amazing.