Algernon Miller: 225 W 17th St, New York, NY
Algernon Miller: Afrofuturism and Beyond
Ethan Cohen Gallery
May 22 – June 28th, 2025
225 West 17th Street, New York, NY
OPENING RECEPTION:
MAY 22, 2025, 6 - 8 pm
Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Afrofuturism and Beyond, Algernon Miller's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will take place May 22 – June 28th at Ethan Cohen Gallery's 225 West 17th Street location, with an opening reception on May 22, 6 – 8 pm.
Algernon Miller (b. New York, 1945) is a visionary painter who has made seminal contributions in the field of visual art to a cultural movement known as Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism encompasses an aesthetic artistic movement, a musical genre, an area of speculative fiction, as well as a broader cultural phenomenon which extends from fantasy and science fiction to popular variations such as comic books. Defined by Ytasha L. Womack as "an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation"[i], the term Afrofuturism was first coined in 1993 by writer Mark Dery who posited in his definitive text Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.
Moreover, the sub legitimate status of science fiction as a pulp genre in Western literature mirrors the subaltern position to which blacks have been relegated throughout American history… Speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of twentieth-century techno culture-and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future might, for want of a better term, be called "Afro-futurism." The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers-white to a man —who have engineered our collective fantasies?”[ii]
For Miller, a reimagining or projecting an Aristotelian vision for the future has been a lifelong pursuit. Miller was fortunate enough to have been raised by a mother who deeply supported culture and the visual arts. From a very young age Miller had access to the painting studio of a family friend to develop his early work. His prodigious paintings earned him placement in schools which fostered his career as a painter. Miller attended the School of Visual Arts (1965-67) and The New School (1967-68) during America’s cultural revolution, during which time he was deeply influenced by African studies and Afrocentric writings.
Miller’s mature works developed in the late sixties, works from this period were characterized by hard edge geometric forms, and frequently realized on shaped canvases or sculptures with complex rounded forms. Miller’s use of bold color reflected an awareness and an adoption of palette which acknowledged and embraced colors schemes derived from African cultures.
One of the defining developments of Miller’s career would come on a trip to upstate New York in 1979. While exploring options to fabricate large scale sculptures Miller discovered a material which would go on to deeply impact his practice. Piled on the floor of a machine shop he spotted metal turnings, spiraled metal coils which were made by a machinist as he turned metal on a lathe. Miller held up a bundle of the coils and as the light showed through, he was reminded of brambles and foliage he had seen on his journey, a discarded heap of industrial waste evoking the organic and the wonder of the natural world at once. Miller brought the material to his Soho loft and began to incorporate it into his practice. He would present piles, scattered wall installations and self-contained painted metal wall-based works. Miller’s metal coil works drew the attention of Marcia Tucker and his works were exhibited at The New Museum. Simultaneously Miller was approached by the gallerist Yves Arman who he continued to exhibit with until Arman’s tragic death.
During the eighties Miller’s practice took another turn. While working on the metal coil works Miller observed when painting the coils with sprays, a negative shadow could be produced on a flat plain. Miller embraced this natural byproduct and transformed it into a deliberate facet of his painting practice creating impressive large scale all over abstract canvases which included not only the sprayed shadows of lathe turnings but hand rendered areas of abstraction which further added to the work’s overall dimension and complexity. The inherent kinetic energy in the coils, coupled with the pictorial energy leveled by the copious compositions, reflected the tenants of Afrofuturism and can be seen as allusions to Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist explorations. Miller would later revise his painting practice which integrated turnings as a formal device by first setting an all over ground of abstraction, after which he would place a number of turnings on the canvas and spray them with an even coating of black. In my opinion they are perhaps some of the most sophisticated and significant Afrofuturist paintings, at once the subject elicits simultaneously the macro and micro with visual interpretations ranging from the cellular to the stellar, all the while enveloped in a field of Blackness.
Always the innovator, Miller would continue to push the boundaries of his artistic practice. After being exposed to quantum theory, Miller painted a series of kaleidoscopic paintings rendered in bold primary with a deftness rarely matched by hyperrealist painters. Depicting amongst other things: neon light, Bronx motorcycles, and discarded detritus, these paintings are compelling in that they at once are quintessentially Afrofuturist yet are formally rooted in street still life and landscape. Furthermore, adding to the artistic complexity of the works they exist in an uncanny zone in which they simultaneously occupy both hyperrealism as well as abstraction.
The range of Miller’s virtuosity and his commitment to progress regardless of form would see him go on to explore areas of new media including light-based works and video. Additionally, Miller is an architect, he has developed concepts for structures which reflect the Black experience as well as realizing major public plazas such as the Fredrik Douglas Circle at the northwest corner of Central Park. Seen in plan the granite and bronze plaza integrates the geometric patterns of 19th century quilts, which were used as codes. Similarly, to the sculpture, often semiotics or codes compound the complexity of Miller’s canvases. Miller has made use of fractal generating software and had Kante text translated into code, both of which have become languages he uses in his painting practice. As with the future so has the past permeated into Miller’s work, the artist’s most recent works feature not only a mathematically shifting dimensionality as seen through stenciled ovoids but through the fusion of hieroglyphic pictographs as well as the adoption of numerological signifiers, all of which serve to simultaneously acknowledge the history of the African American experience as well as image a future beyond.
[i] Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. 1st edition, Independent Publishers Group, 2013, p. 9.
[ii] Dery, Mark (1993). "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose". The South Atlantic Quarterly. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, Pp. 180
About Algernon Miller:
Algernon Miller is a leading figure in the intellectual wing of Afrofuturist art. Educated at the School of Visual Arts (1965-67) and The New School (1967-68) during America’s cultural revolution, he was deeply influenced by African studies and Afrocentric writings. Miller later evolved what he calls a “transformationist” consciousness that synthesizes past, present, and future.
Algernon Miller’s work draws on sacred geometry, numerology, and the structures of nature, science, and architecture, and he frequently references African and African American artistic heritage, such as beading and quilting traditions. Yet, his use of new technologies traverses the so-called digital divide that associates blackness with technological disadvantage. Along with many Afrofuturist thinkers, he is conscious of a long line of “Blacks in Science,” under-recognized black inventors and innovators,
Miller experiments with sound, kinetic energy, solar-power, 3D animation, and holography. His emphasis on light, both represented and used as an artistic medium, undermines historical associations of blackness with darkness, and reinforces Afrofuturist metaphysical concepts.
Miller’s major public commissions include his Tree of Hope on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, and the Frederick Douglass Circle at the northwest corner of Central Park. His works are in multiple prominent collections and have been exhibited at The New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Arts & Design, The Studio Museum, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Espace Lyonnais d'Art Contemporain, Lyon.
Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 6pm.
Text by: Isaac Aden
Press Contacts:
Lara Kamhi: lara@ecfa.com
Isaac Aden: isaac@ecfa.com