PARIS — Wifredo Lam’s hot, hybrid style is essentially spiky.
afrofuturism
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Senegal’s Trash Transformed into Afrofuturist Haute Couture
In The Prophecy, a striking series by Dakar-based photographer Fabrice Monteiro, majestic alien creatures wear hoop skirts and headdresses made from soda cans, garbage bags, fishing nets, tortoise shells, and the odd baby doll.
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The Fantastical Paradoxes of Afrofuturist Film
Imaginative, aesthetic, historically fixated, and cosmically liberated, afrofuturism could be subject to low budgets, racism, sexism, and indifference, and still count itself a master of radiant ideas.
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At the New Museum, Notes Toward Space’s Oddity
“You know, Sun Ra is a formative figure for many young artists,” Georg Schöllhammer, Vienna director of the curatorial collective Tranzit, avowed to me recently on the fifth floor of the New Museum.
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He Who Controls the Past: Highlights from “The Shadows Took Shape” at the Studio Museum
One part a literary subgenre of sci-fi, pioneered by the likes of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, and one part cross-cultural, interdisciplinary aesthetic movement, Afrofuturism — a term coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future”— can be tricky to describe.
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The Days of Future Past: Afrofuturism and Black Memory
When you walk into the main gallery of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s current exhibition The Shadows Took Shape, which explores contemporary art through the lens of Afrofuturist aesthetics, one of the first pieces to catch the eye is a glittering procession of black astronauts fanned across a faded landscape.
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Seychelle Allah Talks Space Slave Trade & His Aggregate Style
One of the figures behind Space Slave Trade, Seychelle Allah discusses his brand of afrofuturism that layers the visual culture around him into a world in which the aggregate plays an important role.
Allah’s relationship with social media has been complex. Space Slave Trade, named after a friend’s band, started after he was kicked off Facebook for sharing images deemed inappropriate by the service. The resulting blog is NSFW and careens from porn-like images with young Asian girls to absurd representations of starving Africans. The aesthetic is young, fresh, and aggressive without being violent.
