Bloodchild: Nyame Brown, Xandra Ibarra, Shara Mays, Gregory Rick, Stuart Robertson, and Leila Weefur
Archive exhibition
Overview
Nyame Brown, Legendary, 2020, oil on blackboard, 24 x 36 in
OPENING RECEPTION:
Saturday, November 5, 3:00-5:00 PM
Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Minnesota Street Project
ARTIST WALK-THROUGH:
3:30 PM
Jenkins Johnson Gallery is pleased to present Bloodchild, featuring work by Nyame Brown, Xandra Ibarra, Shara Mays, Gregory Rick, Stuart Robertson, and Leila Weefur. Taking its title from Octavia E. Butler’s story titled “Bloodchild,” first published in 1984, this exhibition invites the viewer to investigate the power of speculative fiction to imagine alternative world-buildings and narrative-making strategies.
Perceived as the mother of Afrofuturism, the genre blending science fiction, fantasy, and history to speculate on liberated future scenarios through a Black lens, Butler wrote cautionary tales. In her stories and novels, she projects into the future to investigate possible solutions. Using Butler’s “Bloodchild” story as a lens to look at the art-making today, the exhibition meditates on symbiosis, love, power, and tough choices. Set on a foreign planet inhabited by insect-like beings, “Bloodchild” is a coming of age story, raising provocative questions about sex roles, self-sacrifice, colonization, and species-interdepence. Similarly, the artists featured in this exhibition ask complex questions via speculative artistic practices and challenge their own mediums to imagine alternate futures.