San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Mothership’ exhibit collapses space and time to envision a Black future.
At the heart of the Oakland Museum of California’s latest exhibition, a fierce warrior known to millions of movie and comic book fans commands attention.
In an installation dedicated to the late actor Chadwick Boseman, Ruth E. Carter’s costumes for Boseman’s Dora Milaje royal guard in the 2018 hit movie “Black Panther,” which was partially set in Oakland, take center stage. Combining influences of traditional
African dress with facets of cutting-edge technology, their prominent location in the first large exhibit space of “Mothership:
Voyage Into Afrofuturism” serves as a clear visual representation of its theme. In collapsing the two elements of African heritage and futuristic tech, Carter’s creation does not take away from either.
With the phrase “There are Black people in the future” repeated throughout the walls of the exhibit, “Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism” is a love letter to the intersection of the African diaspora and a technologically advanced future. The concept, while simple, feels radical, as the idea of a future of any kind can feel harder and harder to grasp right now, amid the pandemic, racial and political strife, and raging wildfires. Afrofuturism not only serves as an expression of this phrase but also offers a framework for Black Americans to follow.
The term “Afrofuturism” was coined during the 1990s to describe a tradition of visual art, music and literature that featured futuristic advancements in technology alongside Black people and Blackness itself. Science fiction writer Octavia Butler, who is featured throughout the exhibit, is seen as one of the central figures of Afrofuturism. Likewise, the music of jazz composer Sun Ra and the art of JeanMichel Basquiat are seen as representative of Afrofuturism and the many things it can be.
“Afrofuturism is a very broad concept, and we can think about the intersection between Blackness and technology, and Blackness as a type of technology,” said Essence Harden, the museum’s consulting curator.
Harden sees the phrase “There are Black people in the future” as a way to push against the marginalization and violence Black people experience.
“Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism,” which will be on view through Feb. 27, showcases work across mediums, dating from the early days of the Black American experience to the present.
The Afrofuturism movement “is about collapsing time and space, so what happened in 1919 is just as relevant as what happened in 2019,” Harden explained. “You can understand that Black folks’ mere presence of life and living is in part resisting this impossibility that’s facing them, which is life, in a world that is fully anti-Black.”
“Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism” is the museum’s first new exhibition since the start of the pandemic. It was scheduled to open in October, but public health orders forced the museum to suspend in-person operations from March 2020 to June.
Rhonda Pagnozzi, a curator at the East Bay institution since 2017, served as lead curator, working with Oaklandborn Harden, a doctoral candidate in the African American studies department at UC Berkeley. The museum had been at work on the project before the protests over the police killing of George Floyd erupted last summer and worked with more than 50 Black artists and historians in
creating the exhibit.
“As a non-Black curator, it was critical on this project to center the voices of Black creatives,” said Pagnozzi, who is white.
To mount the exhibition, new walls were erected to create more intimate spaces, and the museum’s 7,600square-foot Great Hall was painted with darker tones, primarily black and grays. The effect makes each installation more striking, as the exhibits contrast with the simple and muted nature of the space.
The exhibit engulfs a visitor immediately with a hypnotizing sound installation, “Mothership Calling,” by Pittsburgh composer Nicole Mitchell, and a mural, “Radio Imagination,” by San Francisco artist Sydney Cain, both created in 2020. The mural aims to capture the idea of a collapse of time and space, featuring visuals of ancestors of the African diaspora while being abstract enough that it feels like something part of a distant future.
The exhibit also features multiple collages. Perhaps the most striking are Rashaad Newsome’s “Parenting While Black” and “Thirst Trap,” both created last year. The works, surrounded by Gucci logos and bejeweled flowers in Newsome’s trademark wallpaper, center on the expectations Black people must adhere to, juxtaposed against the modern
Black American experience.
But the most immersive part of the exhibit — a replica of P-Funk’s titular Mothership — sits dead center and toes the line between feeling like a relic from the golden age of science fiction and a working spaceship. Created in-house by museum builders, it mixes intoxicating sounds and visuals from iconic funk musician
George Clinton with flashing lights.
Toward the end of the exhibit, visitors encounter renderings of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Georgia Negro: A Social Study,” which dates to 1900. The famed author and activist’s work features a series of graphs meant to portray and reflect the lives and conditions of Black Americans at the turn of the last century. They were created with the optimism for a better future for Black Americans in a United States that barely recognized the existence of Black Americans as a class of people. “This has been in our DNA from the start,” said museum Deputy Director Valerie Huaco. “The mission of the museum to inspire all Californians to create a more vibrant future for themselves and their communities really aligns with the thinking of Afrofuturism — creating Black spaces, celebrating Black joy and celebrating the mundane.”