Pinellas Diaspora Arts Project was proud to present the exhibit, BRIDGES: FUTURE/PRESENT, FUTURE/PAST– as part of the 2nd Tampa Bay Afrofuturism Festival November 3 – 19, 2023.
BRIDGES celebrated the talent and experience of a select group of Tampa Bay artists of the diaspora whose work and life experience has happened over a time period including the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, United Farm Workers Movement, La Raza Unida, the Chicano Liberation Movement, and much of the Pan African and African Liberation movements, in the exhibit titled BRIDGES: FUTURE/PRESENT, FUTURE/PAST.
“Nearly three decades have passed since the cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism,” asking the question: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?
Now unleashed across the globe, Afrofuturism’s seismic influences can be seen in fashion, music, the visual arts, technology, science fiction, and perhaps most recognizably in Ryan Coogler’s 2018 blockbuster Black Panther.” – Shantay Robinson, Smithsonian Magazine
The answer to Dery’s original question was already evident, if unnoticed, in the cultural production of legendary Black artists, as evidenced in Sheree Renee Thomas’ anthology, “Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora” – which included a speculative fiction story written by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1920. Icon of Afrofuturism Sun Ra’s musical, filmed, and poetic offerings predated Dery’s question as well. Zora Neal Hurston, dubbed “Mother of Afrofuturism” for her anthropological revelations of the mystery and Black spiritual traditions alluding to otherworldly wisdom, added another series of references to underpin the term afrofuturism.
The artists included have lived for five decades or more — over half this century…and have survived to continue to create, conjure, inspire, and envision from our past, into our present…and into our future. It is from this deep well of influence that we were honored to experience their work in the exhibit BRIDGES: FUTURE/PRESENT, FUTURE/PAST.
Artists: Coral Marshall, Gary L. Lemons, Vivia Barron, John Gascot, Boyzell Henry, Debbie Garrett, Elaine Chambliss, Aleesh Mustaqim, Steven Ramsey, Luis ‘Papo’ Rodriguez, Christopher Williams, Frederick Woods, Ray Brown, Freeman, Dallas Cooper Jackson.
