ReviewJulian Chambliss Brings
AfroFantastic to Rollins College by Vanessa Barros Andrade
AfroFantastic : Black Imagination and Agency in the American Experience is up now at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum on Rollins College campus . Professor Julian Chambliss , Ph . D curated the show in conjunction with students from his AfroFantastic class . Chambliss and I got the chance to sit down and talk about his inspirations for the show , how he went about the curation process , and what it was like putting together his fi rst visual arts show in a museum setting .
Chambliss worked on the AfroFantasic show as a part of a class called AfroFantasic . It is an experimental class that students can take at Rollins ; it ’ s the fi rst version of the course and he ’ s hoping to work it into the mix . I ’ m interested in knowing if Rollins could provide this class free of charge to black people and people of color . The students in this class helped to write the wall text / didactic after extensive research . Afrofuturism , part of the concept for the show , is a literary and cultural aesthetic movement that depicts a black-centric future while incorporating science fi ction themes , historical fi ction , magic realism , and strife experienced by black people and people of color . The term was coined in the 1990s but it retroactively identifi es different moments in history where Afrofuturism was , in a way , being conveyed . The Afro- Fantastic exhibition is looking at the black imaginary since the nineteenth century : “ The black imaginary is a space of empowerment and agency .” Chambliss is also heavily infl u- enced by graphic novels — you ’ ll see a lot of this aesthetic inspiration in the show . The counter-narrative of white expectations and ideologies like post-colonial theory are also recurring themes in the show .
What does black art look like in a white cube gallery setting ? Who ’ s the audience , the primary gaze ? What does a black-centric future look like ?
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BrotherMan : Dictator of Discipline , by Dawud Anyabwile , Issue 1 pg . 17 , brush and ink , zip a tone
There are expectations of black artists from the art world that create trends within the community . I see these trends amongst my peers , at art galleries , at art fairs , and in museums . I also experience this type of questioning when it comes to my own practice ( both of my parents were born and raised in Cape Verde , a country off of the west coast of Africa ) although the experience is slightly different from African Americans ( only because our country was ruled by a different group of white people , the Portuguese ). These questions do come up after I fi nd myself making empirically charged , identity-based works because this is the work that gets the most response .
After getting the backstory of Chambliss ’ curation process , some Afrofuturism history , and rethinking of all the questions that come
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