Today’s news is filled with local interest: Artist Mikel Elam was asked to reimagine the Liberty Bell and what it symbolizes. He fashioned a sculptural mask called “A muzzle to silence you,” from materials that suggest the history of enslaved Africans.
Read MoreAlex Smith reviews Black Quantum Futurism’s exhibition at Center for Emerging Visual Artists, All Time is Local, closing May 31, 2019.
Read MoreChip Schwartz reports on the history of the Icebox Project Space and speaks with co-founders Tim Belknap and Ryan McCartney about how their vision for a multi-purpose arts venue has evolved over the years. He also gives us the scoop on future programming at the Icebox, including a Pew-funded haunted house that taps into our city’s rich LGBTQIA creative networks.
Read MoreThis week on Artblog Radio we’re featuring audio from the Blue Note Salon, an April 21st panel curated by Black Quantum Futurism at the Icebox Project Space. This interactive discussion covers a wide range of topics from the role of jazz musicians and jazz culture in paving the way for the Civil Rights Movement to current efforts by local artists to connect their work to social change movements addressing gentrification, displacement and cultural heritage preservation.
Read MoreWhat will the future bring? Will it be bliss or apocalypse? Imagining the future has always been a means of actively processing the history of the present. In 1895, H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine critiqued labor and class conditions of the day by transporting his protagonist to a future ruled by bloodthirsty proletariat mutants feeding off the waifish decedents of the aristocracy. In the racially charged climate of 1966, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek envisioned a future where the races worked side by side to seek out new civilizations and new sexual conquests. Perhaps most strikingly of all, in the 1980s and ’90s Octavia Butler provided an alternative to the stagnantly white male visions of the future and created stories that were sculpted by the past and current oppression of women and blacks. So for this week’s Reader Advisor I offer few links that examine how we shape the future and how our projections shape the here and now.
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