The Shadows Took Shape

This the final week of The Shadows Took Shape, catch this exhibition before it closes March 9th!

TIM ROLLINS and K.O.S. Invisible Man (after Ralph Ellison), 2008 matte acrylic and book pages on canvas 24 x 24 inches 61 x 61 cm LM11968

Here are the slides for my presentation from the Black Aquatic and Afrofuturism panel last Thursday at the Studio Museum of Harlem:

Black Aquatic Slideshow

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Spotify Playlist 

A great recap of the panel by afutureancient with links to many of the discussed works can be found here:

Join The Shadows Took Shape book club Sunday, February 23, 2014 at 4pm

In honor of the major group exhibition The Shadows Took Shape, please join The Studio Museum for a new series of book club discussions moderated by prominent artists, scholars, and bloggers interested in science fiction and speculative literature. The moderator for Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist is Jeffrey Allen Tucker, Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African & African-American Studies at the University of Rochester.

The Intuitionist is set in the curious world of elevator inspection, portrays a universe parallel to our own, where matters of morality, politics, and race reveal unexpected ironies. This novel takes place in a city full of skyscrapers and other buildings requiring vertical transportation in the form of elevators. The time, never identified explicitly, is one when black people are called “colored” and integration is a current topic. The protagonist is Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector of the “Intuitionist” school. The Intuitionists practice an inspecting method by which they ride in an elevator and intuit the state of the elevator and its related systems. The competing school, the “Empiricists,” insists upon traditional instrument-based verification of the condition of the elevator. Watson is the second black inspector and the first black female inspector in the city.

Organized by Jared Richardson, PhD candidate in Art History at Northwestern University, this discussion featuresAlexander G. Weheliye, Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University and Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux whose work is included inThe Shadows Took Shape.

Tickets: bit.ly/1hs6zml

The Black Aquatic and Afrofuturism: The Shadows Took Shape Panel Discussion

Feb 6, 2014 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Space may have been the place for jazz visionary Sun Ra, but there is another location that has often been excluded from discussions of Afrofuturism: the ocean. From the mythic, underwater world of Drexciya, to the music of Azealia Banks and the artwork of Ellen Gallagher, the ocean has flooded several modes of black cultural expression. Join the Studio Museum for a trans-disciplinary dialogue that conceptualizes “black aquatic space” as it relates to the global production of black science fictions across film, theory, literature, music and contemporary art.

Organized by Jared Richardson, PhD candidate in Art History at Northwestern University, this discussion features Alexander G. Weheliye, Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University and Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux whose work is included in The Shadows Took Shape.