Galleries

Magical realism is not merely a literary genre, but instead a very real actuality for we – the black and brown people of this earth. We smuggle the spiritual into every waking moment just as Afro-Futurism smuggles the intellectual and the axé (after Paul Carter Harrison and Sandra Jackson Dumont) – the beauty and the power of our multitudinous voices – into the every day. Imagine scenes of lush color flooded by the light of the sun – in Bridgetown, in Brooklyn, in Brixton, in Bamako. Intersections of the past, present and future grounded in the magic that was already in the soil, in the air, passed on by our ancestors through breath, bonds, blood, ritual well after we came across the Atlantic all of these many times. We carry it with us wheresoever we go – this abundant color, rhythm, swagger, this ambulatory cosmology. Who and what we are now is a combination of Ley lines and the mixtures of all the noises and the gods we carry in our blood from the Americas, West Africa and India and whatever other watersheds we came from. Because of this, we see and hear magic in everything across water, space and time. Through the work of selected visual artists, Black Magic: AfroPasts/AfroFutures explores magical blackness through the lens of days gone by and imaginings of what is yet to come across the Diaspora.