Forever, A Moment: Black Meditations on Time and Space

Curated by Yetunde J. Olagbaju and Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, Forever, A Moment: Black Meditations on Time and Space (FAM) is a multidisciplinary community art exhibition that explores Black Identity and the way it experiences, interprets, distorts, and ultimately, transforms time and space.

Collective memory, possible futures, alternate histories, and infinite space collide in the gallery to challenge the lack of Black agency that exists within the “White Cube”. By bringing together Black artists who are investigating ritual, color, place, and history, FAM radically reshapes the gallery itself into a new type of space, one unburdened by societal expectations of Blackness.

Andrew Wilson, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo and Umar Rashid build ritual spaces that invite us to bend and warp time — allowing us to reconstruct Black ritual spaces. Chris Martin, Sydney Cain, and Tosha Stimage create stark monochrome images that challenge the historical context that Blackness is so often confined within. Sean Henry Smith’s work focuses on what we leave behind and what, of that material, can be taken by others. Muzae Sesay and Patrica Thomas deconstruct our notions of memory by breaking down places and bodies we inhabit. And the video work of Alexa Burrell, Cameron Granger, Kasmir Jones, and Summer Fucking Mason construct their own worlds, with their own unique rules of time and space.

In conversation with one another, these works employ collective Black memory as multidimensional connecting threads. These threads bind expansive ways of existing together in a patchwork microcosm of Black futurity, possibility, and experience.