Thursday night, interdisciplinary artist Anne Walsh gave a talk that she revamped the day before  in response to the unexpected election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

In an interview hours before her talk, she admitted that “life got in the way” of her plans for the talk when Trump won on Tuesday.

“I felt that it was so irrelevant for me to go across the country and pull out my slideshow and go, ‘Here’s my work,’” Walsh said.  “And then I was leaving and … I thought about how I could curate a selection of pieces to show today that would allow me to say something I wouldn’t have otherwise thought about.”

She hoped that in her talk she would be able to say “Here’s how I can move forward, here’s where I’m going to find my faith, and here’s where I’m going to draw courage from to endure.”

Much of the talk took on new, unexpected meaning in the context of Trump’s election on Tuesday, particularly when Walsh focused on one of her pieces featured on The Thing Quarterly, a website that “publishes objects.” The piece displays a solid rubber wedge engraved with a letter Walsh wrote to tennis star Billie Jean King as a young girl after King beat Bobby Riggs in one of the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” tennis matches.

During her talk, she projected the wedge on the wall and read the engraving aloud.

“[Y]ou are my inspiration because you are so strong,” she had written to King. “You are so passionate about equality for girls and women. You won that match for me and for everyone who cares about women’s lib.”

Reading the letter again, Walsh almost began to cry. She said it was a realization that this letter was something that her own young daughter could have written if the Hillary Clinton had won the election.

“Let’s make some doorstops,” she continued. “Let’s keep the door open.”

Walsh said that seeing art in the San Francisco airport before her flight here reminded her of the craft’s importance.

“I don’t know if any of what I’m going to show you today is going to make you feel hopeful or like organizing,” she said. “But the work that I saw today made me feel better. One of the places I have to begin is just by affirming what my values are, and one of them is just that I really deeply believe that all kinds of art need to exist … I’m going to keep making work.”

Much of the content of Walsh’s talk focused on the concept of translation. She played audio recordings from a piece which she and sound designer Chris Kubick produced in conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art. They recorded psychic mediums attempting to contact the deceased artist Joseph Cornell’s spirit and “translated” that into audio tours for visitors at the museum.

In her piece “An Annotated Hearing Trumpet,” she began by attempting to adapt the book “The Hearing Trumpet” into a movie. Instead, she has created an ongoing interdisciplinary project including images and writing that will eventually be published as a book.

The project has become like a hall of mirrors that explores what it means for humans to adapt and translate art.

“The book that was gonna be a movie is gonna be a book about a book going to be a movie,” she said.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Erin Johnson was a graduate student of Walsh’s at the University of California, Berkeley. She said she was excited for her own students to get to meet one of her most influential teachers.

“There’s this nice closing of a circle for a moment in which we can all have conversations together that were started in my own life via Anne,” she said. “Thinking about lineage and influence is exciting and important to me as an artist and a woman.”