"The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined" to open at the James E. Lewis Museum (JELMA) on Thursday, February 23 from 5 - 8 pm. The award winning exhibition, curated by Galerie Myrtis' founding director, Myrtis Bedolla, premiered at the 59th Venice Biennale's "Personal Structures: Time, Space and Existence" satellite featuring the works of artists Tawny Chatmon, Larry Cook, Morel Doucet, Monica Ikegwu, M. Scott Johnson, Delita Martin, Arvie Smith, and Felandus Thames. Featured artists utilized paintings, prints, sculpture, video, and photography to claim agency over Blackness and envision a world devoid of socio-economic inequalities, the pandemic, and white supremacy.

The travelling exhibition will be on view at the JELMA until Friday, September 15, 2023. For more information, go to www.jelmamuseum.org/events/!

In, "The Afro‐Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined" African-American artists construct a future forged in transatlantic links and Afrofuturism’s ideology to expand the notion of Blackness at the intersection of technology and liberation. An existence conceived, as asserted by author Kevin Young, in the “Elsewhere…the remapping of what’s here,” forming an alternative reality where one’s freedom and humanity is found. A utopian world— at its nucleus, Black lives the dark matter that sustains the universe, and Black activists, creativities, and intellectuals, the heavenly bodies and sustenance of black holes—gives birth to the exploration of the future Time, Space and Existence of Blackness.

 LOCATION

The Carl J. Murphy Fine Arts Center
Morgan State University
2201 Argonne Drive
Baltimore, MD 21251