The Truth In This Art, created by Rob Lee, is a podcast interview series supporting the vibrancy and development of Baltimore's(and beyond) arts and culture. The Peale is thrilled to be able to add these interviews to the Baltimore Stories archive.
Rob Lee (00:04): Welcome to The Truth In This Art. I am your host, Rob Lee. And today I have the privilege of chatting with the executive director of Afro Charities and an artist with deep roots in Baltimore and Los Angeles. Please welcome Savannah Wood. Welcome to the podcast.
Savannah Wood (00:25): Than you Rob. Happy to be here.
Rob Lee (00:27): Happy to have you join. We're both wearing glasses right now. You have much more hair than I do. I am bald.
Savannah Wood (00:33): I actually got rid of about half of my hair yesterday, so this is much less than I typically have.
Rob Lee (00:40): See, you're just bragging you. I don't like it, frankly. See I have this. That's all I got. So again, thank you for joining. I want to dive right into some of those vital stats. What's your background. And when did you first become interested in, I guess, ancestral research? That's kind of what I've been looking at.
Savannah Wood (01:00): That's the vibe, that's the vibe. Stats. I kind of like grew up in Baltimore, but I was born on the west coast. So I went to Baltimore School for the Arts. I got to ask where'd you go to high school theater production, which is now like stage design and production or something. And yeah, I went to college out in Los Angeles. My mom's whole family's from LA, my dad's whole family's from Baltimore. So really, as you said, and as it is in my bio, very deeply rooted in both places.
Savannah Wood (01:33): And then the question about ancestral research, I guess I kind of started getting into that a little bit in college.
Rob Lee (01:39): Sure.
Savannah Wood (01:43): I have all these figures in my family who are part of major black historical things. And so at a certain point I didn't feel like as a kid, you don't really understand the gravity of some of that stuff. And then when you get older, you're like, wait a minute. What, like you did what? So my grandfather on my mom's side was a Tuskegee airman and he actually wrote and produced that movie that came out in 95 on HBO, the Tuskegee Airman. And so around sometime in college, I started doing this art project kind of about his life by sitting with my grandmother and going through some of these objects that were from his time in World War II and et cetera. And then later I moved to Chicago for a while, which was a really amazing time and lived there. And I came back to LA and when I came back to LA, I was looking at some old work that I made and saw this video of all these things that I had been handling for my grandfather's life.
Savannah Wood (02:41): And on the back of this photograph with him and some other woman who was not my grandmother, by the way, there was an address, but the address was literally right next door to where I had been working in Chicago. So they were in a club that was on the exact same block that I was on in Chicago. When stuff like that happens, you're just like, "Whoa, what?" We're just really crossing paths with our ancestors and spending time in the same places. And I started... Anyway, long winded way to say that was a point where it was electrifying. And I'm like, "Oh, there's something to this. I got to dig a little bit deeper in this." But yeah, I can leave it there for now.
Rob Lee (03:23): No, that look don't get me started because when it comes to digging and uncovering things and learning new things well relearning or discovering things, especially when it comes to families, you may have heard it and like, hold on, run that back because sometimes somebody may mention it and it's like, yeah he'll be doing that stuff. It's like, "What do you mean?"
Asset ID: 2022.13.01
Transcription abbreviated: Contact the Peale for a complete transcript.
