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Fantastic Ingenuity: Imagine Feeling Something
Georgetown Steamplant Seattle, September 2024
This exhibition brings together Black artists and researchers to engage in a timely conversation: How do speculative theories and creative practices contribute to sustaining and honoring Black life?
Weaving together textiles, sculpture, multimedia, films, performance, and storytelling, Fantastic Ingenuity expands our understanding of Afrofuturism and technology. Black cinema scholar Kara Keeling defines Afrofuturism as combining technology, imagination, futurity, and liberation— all of which are vital to the goals of Black studies, which is to say Black liberation and expression of Black life in its many intersections.
The artists of Fantastic Ingenuity work with these Afrofuturist tenets to demonstrate that building sustainable Black futures requires us to reconsider and alter our relationships with embodiments, feelings, community building, and our sensory experience (sight, sound, touch).
Poster for FI
we sense, we remember,we rest, we dream: We Black, We Surreal
Jacob Lawrence Gallery Seattle, July 2023
Together, the literary, visual, sonic, haptic, and olfactory artists explore Blackness through elusive and otherworldly aesthetics, providing a new lens to contemplate Black being, living, presence, and knowing. For my contribution, I invited poet Ariana Benson, who offered experimental poetics to realize ways of being outside of reality. I also invited Na-Moya Lawrence and Debbie Lin of SAMAR to excite our olfactory senses to spark ecstatic journeys.
Black Invention in 3 Parts
SOIL Art Gallery Seattle, February 2023
Black Invention in 3 Parts presents works by J K Chukwu, August Oaks, and myself. Together they imagine otherworldly existences, experiences, and beings. The show will present literary and visual arts that are speculative, surreal, ethereal, and at times dark. As the works will make clear, Blackness can exist in the depths of the underworlds, on exoplanets in space, and within a phenomenal Black Hole.
Portraits of Ecstatic Feeling: Al Smith Collection
MOHAI Seattle, March- September 2022
In my pursuit to analyze and closely read Al Smith’s photographs, I’m interested in how Smith shows us worldbuilding of Black otherworlds by demonstrating the intimate ways of being with friends and family, enjoying the beauty of life, and experimentations. His photographs show how Black people in Seattle built a world for them to be filled with a sense of community love. A world that greatly opposes how the anti-Black world likes to imagine Black life. When noticing the aesthetic patterns within Smith’s body of work, it’s clear that Smith's artistic style catches people during moments of laughter, cries, conversations, annoyances, the beauty of rest. He photographs people during the authentic motions during their conversation and various moods. Allowing myself to be in the moment while reading Smith’s photograph transcends space and time— calling forth an ecstatic reading practice.
Queer Imagination: Ecstatic Worldbuilding
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery Seattle, June 2021
How can we distort and transcend our material realities and build worlds with new ways of being, thinking, and knowing? What can be explored through such an imaginative shift? This exhibition brings together artists, researchers, and scholars to honor their imaginative worldbuilding techniques. We work together to offer insights for how the world governed through violent logics can be radically warped, shifted, redesigned, or altogether burned to the ground. We work to build a world that can only be accessed through ecstatic means of imagining otherwise existences.
