Afrofuturism: 225 West 17th Street, New York, NY

Afrofuturism:

Somewhere on the South Side of Saturn

By Isaac Aden

“My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up... I wasn't in human form... I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn... they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools... the world was going into complete chaos... I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That's what they told me.^[1]”

According to his biographer John Szwed, by Ra’s account his extra-terrestrial experience “allegedly occurred a full decade before flying saucers entered public consciousness^[2]”. 

Whether personal mythology or actual abduction account, what is certain is that the incident deeply impacted Sun Ra’s arts and would shape what would come to be known as Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism encompasses an asthenic artistic movement, a musical genre, an area of speculative fiction, as well as a broader cultural phenomenon. Defined by Ytasha L. Womack as "an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation"^[3], 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.

“African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind).
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?”^[4]

The artists included in the exhibition Afrofuturism at Ethan Cohen Gallery (2025) were selected by Algernon Millers and include Ellsworth Ausby, Nanette Carter, Renee Cox, Ernest Frazier, Algernon Miller, Tyrone Mitchell, and Joe Overstreet.  Miller, who will turn Eighty during the duration of the exhibition, has gathered these elders to highlight the early predecessors of the movement’s visual language.  While many of the artists have worked in a variety of styles, it is compelling to consider how their work evolved into a dialogue with the movement.  For many this development was not necessarily the result of a series of formal artistic decisions but rather the aesthetic conclusion was reached in response to the inescapable weight of the content of the black experience in America.

Renee Cox (b. 1960) is an American photographer, much of her early work dealt with the body, portraiture, identity, motherhood, and shared experience of African Americans. However, as Cox recounted in her May 2025 interview with Isaac Aden, she experienced a shift in consciousness which subsequently led to a shift in her photographic practice. After reading Eckhardt Tolle in Bali. Cox recounted asking herself the question Tolle had poised in his writing “ Why are you waiting for someone to validate you? ^[5]” Cox than underwent a process of rational observation in which she purposefully rejected any and all negative thoughts in her head, after which she arrived at a place of “no thought”, a space of enlightened consciousness in which Cox was able to manifest a new direction for her work

“When I did the work, it was not so much about identity, it was more inclusive of others. I was creating my own world where people of color were welcome and free to express themselves, however they saw fit.^[6]”

Cox began to incorporate kaleidoscopic mirroring and repetition into her photography and portraiture. Her work began to take on a new dynamism as seen in her body of work Soul Culture, in which her portraits transcend the empiricism of the camera and seek to illuminate the more profound presence of the sitter’s soul. While as is in other aspects of her Practice Cox has made use of historical allusion, the Soul Culture series similarly evokes the rich tradition of South Asian mythical depictions. However, her works clearly propel beyond mere historical allusion into a yet uncharted Aristotelian projection of an Afrofuturist subjectivity, one in which she knows and understand the past and the present, she is not looking backwards, her gaze is forward and set on a future yet unwritten.

In our current moment Nannette Carter (b. 1954) is having her moment with a current solo exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum, a presentation of her work in the Venice Architectural Biennial, and a forthcoming solo museum exhibition in the fall of 2025 at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Carter's work has always addressed the underlying principles of abstraction with an emphasis on color, shape, line, and texture. Carter’s Afrosentinel series incorporates an impressive formal means of production. The works are painted on sheets of mylar which are cut into various shapes and collaged together into individual Sentinels. The complexity works are further compounded by Carter’s groupings of multiple Sentinels into larger works. Each individual work is then mounted to the wall resulting in a process which at first glance resembles a wall drawing or site-specific installation but is in fact a completely nomadic work just as any other discrete object or canvas. Carter has quantified her Sentinels as Afrofuturist works, describing them as protective totems to combat social injustice. According to Hrag Vartanian Carter’s Sentinels:

“…comprise a row of ‘warriors,’ as they’re described in the catalog for the show, that are guardian figures for people of color everywhere. Carter sees them as akin to the terra-cotta soldiers protecting the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang (250–210 BCE). ‘No matter the scale, girth, or color, each sentinel has the strength and acumen to halt all negative forces. These soldiers are fictional constructs that speak to the need for parity and humanity in the world’^[7]”.

Sharing a similar era of soring recognition artist and activist Joe Overstreet (1933–2019) is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Menil Collection entitled: Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight.  Included in the exhibition are examples of Overstreet’s Flight Pattern Paintings which represent the cumulation of his exploration into abstraction. In his Flight Pattern Paintings Overtsreet does not make use of a conventional stretcher support but rather presents unstarched painted canvas in physical space with the aid of roped to create paintings which are realized in three-dimensional space simultaneously with multiple picture planes, a process Overstreet had begun in 1967.

“I was beginning to look at my art in a different light, not as protest, but as a statement about people...By 1970 I had broken free from notions that paintings had to be on the wall in rectangular shapes.^[8]”

 Similarly, in his Conduit Paintings Overstreet reconsiders the boundaries of painting by making use of bent metal conduit as the underlying structure for his paintings, resulting not only in shaped canvases but ones in which the traditional surface of the canvases plane are activated in exhilarating fashion by undulating curves which protrude and distinguish it from the otherwise idle painting.

By contrast the work of Ernest Frazier (1942-2004), who was initially lauded curatorially so far as to even being selected for inclusion in the first Whitney Biennial), has remained in relative  obscurity since his passing in 2004. Worse yet, Frazier was name checked by Evan Beard in his 2017 analytical financial analysis of the trajectory of the art market for ARTSY. Beard’s analysis compared the art market values of artists from the first Whitney biennial in 1973 with the performance of the S&P 500. By dividing the participating artists into two groups, the first with strong market support from galleries such as the relationship between Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Leo Castelli, and a second group lacking a track record yet identified at the time as significant by the museum’s curators.  According to Bead’s analysis:

“If we took the riskier path and bought Group 2 artists without an exhibition history, our returns would not only trail the S&P 500 but would likely be negative. Most Group 2 Biennial artists barely have an active market to speak of today. We might have gotten lucky by purchasing an early Barbara Kruger or Jim Nutt, but many of 1973’s future stars, such as Alice Adams, Terry Allen, Paula Barr, Joel Bass, Jake Berthot, Howard Buchwald, Arthur Cohen, Joyce Cote, William Geis, or Ernest Frazier, returned close to a total loss despite their early curatorial esteem.^[9]”

Suffice to say we have crossed a threshold in which the old guard may be changing, and we are currently in a period in which many artists who have not received the attention or recognition due are beginning to see the light of day.  It is clearly evident that the rubric of good art is not always in accord with market performance, and it too may be subject to correction.

Tyrone Mitchell (b. 1944) is a sculptor originally from Savannah Georgia. Mitchell’s work has been deeply influenced by his travels and with the aid of his personal photography Mitchell is able to integrate ideas about how various cultures construct and create objects into his own practice. Mitchell’s work frequently makes use of ready-made and in contrast to many artists who share the same approach Mitchell appropriates preexisting figural depictions as well. The use of ready-made objects and sculptural material has generally been adopted as a means to present rather than represent in a memetic fashion. The addition of figural representations or other objects which have anthropomorphic implications such as a tricycle or a chair (objects which specifically derive their proportions from the relationship with the human body) allows Mitchell to create semblances of portraiture or rather leave traces of a person’s presence in an otherwise abstract accumulation.

Algernon Miller (b. 1945) is a visionary painter who has made seminal contributions in the field of Afrofuturism.  For Miller, a reimagining or projecting an Aristotelian vision for the future has been a lifelong pursuit.  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.

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 Frederick Douglas Circle at the northwest corner of Central Park. Seen in plan the granite and bronze plaza integrates the geometric patterns of 19^th 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.

Miller’s close friend and fellow Afrofuturist Ellsworth Ausby (1942 - 2011) wrote, “It is a fact that the Black image ‘is’ and has always been established.” Ausby paintings were contended with the “infinite possibilities of two-dimensional space.” Ausby’s early works were marked by hard edged geometric constructions of boldly saturated Afrocentric colors which reflect his engagement with African aesthetics and cultural heritage. Ausby made use of unique supports and shaped canvases, sometimes making use of multiple supports to create large wall-based structures. Within Ausbuy’s painting it is clear he is contending with the cumulations of shapes considered through color and texture, however less evident is an imagined depiction of rays, cosmic collisions, and galactic light which reflect his deep connection to the pursuit of an Afrofuturist vison, in which the meaning of black is not less than, its more…  because as Ausby notes, “Blackness is the source of the colors, which is the Light. ^[10]”