Art and Film Illuminate The Black Imagination

How do contemporary art and film illuminate the Black Imagination? This segment from our archive explores some of the issues and ideas behind creative practices that re-imagine the Black experience.

To begin, we share a conversation recorded with curator Valerie Cassel Oliver from 2013, while she was working at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Cassel Oliver is now Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where she's expanding the representation of African American and African-diasporic artists in the Museum's collection.

On November 2, 2016, artists, filmmakers and curators joined us to consider this topic during the Fresh Art International show on Jolt Radio, Miami. Since then, curator Natalia Zuluaga continues to edit [NAME] publications and co-edits the bilingual online journal Dispatches. In summer 2019, Zuluaga curates Materia Abierta, a program on theory, art and technology in Mexico City. Artist Domingo Castillo has been working under the radar since visualizing the complexities of Miami’s future in his 2017 video Tropical Malaise. In 2019, among other recent projects, artist Jamilah Sabur presented a five channel video installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and showed a commissioned video at Hudson Yards, New York. Amir George, co-founder of the touring visual shorts program Black Radical Imagination, continues to engage in cinema culture. Mikhaile Solomon, founding director of the annual PRIZM art fair, is preparing for the Fair’s seventh year in Miami, scheduled for December 2019.

Sound Editor: Guney Ozsan 2016; Anamnesis Audio 2019 | Special Audio: courtesy Jamilah Sabur and Oolite Arts

Related Episodes: Valerie Cassel Oliver on Black Performance in Contemporary Art and Jean-Ulrick Désert and Trenton Doyle Hancock on Radical Presence, Black in America, Contemporary Black Portraiture

Related Links: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, [NAME] Publications, Hammer Museum, Black Radical Imagination, PRIZM Art Fair, Oolite Arts