feature: new artist residency program, the center for afrofuturist studies, aims to increase iowa city diversity

Image caption: “Black Object / White Smoke I-III” (2015), Alexandria Eregbu. All images courtesy of artists.

By Anaïs Duplan*, AFROPUNK contributor

With the rise of the movement for Black lives to the national spotlight, the Center for Afrofuturist Studies makes a simple proposition: the Afrofuture is now.

A new artist residency program based in Iowa City, the Center for Afrofuturist Studies aims to bring attention to the work of contemporary Black artists, while attempting to create safe spaces for discussion surrounding the future of race and class dynamics in America. In 2016, our first year of programming, we’ll bring eight artists-in-residence to Iowa City, where they’ll lead a series of artist talks, workshops for local marginalized youth, live performances, and community discussions.

Introducing This Year’s Artists…

Image caption: Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Tiona McClodden, Louis Chude-Sokei, Terence Nance, Krista Franklin, Alexandria Eregbu, Yulan Grant, and Devin Cain. Click the image to learn more.

The Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS) operates out of Public Space One, an alternative arts space in downtown Iowa City. When I moved to Iowa City in August, 2015, I quickly realized that PS1 is the only organization of its kind (non-commercial, non-traditional, non-University affiliated) in the surrounding area. It’s been around for over six years and has become a go-to place within the community. Because of this, we’re happy to call PS1 home to the CAS.

CAS is run by a relatively large group of people – a mix of Public Space One curators, Iowa Writers’ Workshop students and graduates, staff members of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, the Dream Center, and lastly, a handful of visual artists located in Chicago and Portland. To our knowledge, nothing like the Center for Afrofuturist Studies has ever existed in Iowa City.

Image caption: “After the Architect Has Gone,” Lewis Colburn, Public Space One.

But we need your support to make it happen.

February 8th is the last day of our Kickstarter campaign. It’s been a great run so far, but we’ve still got a ways to go. We worked with a team of artists from around the country to come up with some pretty unique and exciting Kickstarter perks, like handmade infused salts crafted by New York-based painter Martha Tuttle, original photographs taken by Taja Cheek, the lead vocalist of Throw Vision, and custom mixtapes full of tunes for time travel, made by yours truly. Proceeds from our Kickstarter campaign will allow us to put on a year’s worth of public programming and to contribute to the national conversation about the future(s) of Black lives. Donate today and support the effort!

Our 2016 artists-in-residence represent a broad range of aesthetics and media. As a curatorial team, we’re interested in challenging and expanding – constructing and deconstructing – preexisting visual ideas about Afrofuturism. After all, Afrofuturism is a launching point, not a destination. Scroll down to learn more about this year’s artists-in-residence and consider lending your support.

Tiona McClodden

Image caption: Video still from “Recognition,” a music video for THEESatisfaction.

Tiona McClodden is a filmmaker and visual artist. She produces and distributes her work through her film and media imprint, Harriet’s Gun Media whose mission is to produce and distribute works of art across a range of media platforms that examine, explore, and critique issues at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Themes explored in McClodden’s films and works have been social change, social realism, re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography. She lives and works in North Philadelphia, PA.

Yulan Grant

Yulan Grant is a New York based multi-disciplinary artist from Kingston, Jamaica. As a creative positioned between Caribbean and American culture, her work interrogates ideas of identity, notions of power, perceived histories and the entanglements that happens within these topics. Grant is interested in the role that new media plays in artistic practices and the dialogue they hope to create. Grant’s most recent exhibitions include Paradise Garage in Los Angeles, CA; MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY, Edel Assanti in London, UK and Gallery ALB in Paris, France among others.

Alexandria Eregbu

Image caption: “Black Object / White Smoke I-III” (2015), Alexandria Eregbu.

Alexandria Eregbu is a visual artist whose work often takes shape in the form of performance, programming, and curatorial practices. Her concerns frequently address community, materiality, performativity, and the visibility of racialized and gendered bodies in space. In 2012, Eregbu was commissioned by Out of Site Chicago to perform 11/10/10, a project that confronted the physical and geographical boundaries of the city of Chicago. The following year in 2013, Eregbu curated Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire, Revisited at Columbia College Chicago. This curatorial project reexamined the first Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire— a Surrealist exhibition that took place in Chicago in 1976. Eregbu received her BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. She was recently highlighted in Newcity’s Breakout Artists 2015: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers— and is a current Curatorial Fellow with ACRE this year.”

Krista Franklin

Image caption: “Tommy Gun Tut,” Krista Franklin.

Krista Franklin is the recipient of the Propeller Fund and the Albert P. Weisman Award, and has held residencies at A Studio in the Woods, Cave Canem, and the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life Initiative. Her poems and visual art have been published in Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, Vinyl, BOMB Magazine and Encyclopedia, Vol. F-K. Willow Books published Study of Love & Black Body, her chapbook of poems, in 2012. Franklin’s work has exhibited nationally, and was featured on 20th Century Fox’s Empire (Season Two). She is the co-curator of the Chicago citywide poetry and art initiative, EKPHEST: A Festival of Art + Word, and 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts – Book & Paper from Columbia College Chicago.

Devin Cain

Video caption: “Lilith,” Devin Cain.

D. Cain is a Chicago-based filmmaker, theorist, teaching artist, and writer. He is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s Cinematic Art + Science Program. His work explores the invisible realms of being and the subjects bound by them. He nurtures & utilizes the emotionality of characters and the unconscious to influence its very own aesthetic, creating unique expressionist perceptions.

Louis Chude-Sokei

Louis Chude-Sokei currently teaches at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work includes the award-winning scholarly book The Last Darky (Duke University Press, 2006) and The Sound of Culture (Wesleyan University Press, 2015).

Terence Nance

Video caption: “Worry No. 473 of 1000 Worries that a Black Person Should Not Have to Worry About,” Terence Nance.

Terence Nance is an artist born and raised in Dallas, Texas. Terence makes films, installations, performances, and music. Terence makes music under the name Terence Etc.  His first feature film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, premiered in the New Frontier section of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The album of the same title will be released this year. The film has garnered Terence recognition from Filmmaker magazine, where he was selected as one of the 25 new faces of independent film. Oversimplification… also won the 2012 Gotham Award for “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You.” The film has since been released theatrically in the US, UK, France, and South Africa.  It is currently available on DVD and Digitally through Cinema Guild. In addition to his personal work, Terence is also an accomplished music video director having collaborated on short films and music videos with Blitz the Ambassador, Cody ChesnuTT, and Pharoahe Monch to name a few. Terence currently resides in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn – along with the rest of The Swarm and is currently developing his next feature film.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a conceptual artist, writer and former public school social studies teacher. A 2006 Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Rasheed holds an Ed.M (2008) in Secondary Education from Stanford University as well as a BA (2006) in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College. Rasheed’s work has been exhibited at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, BRIC Art Gallery, Weeksville Heritage Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Vox Populi

Image caption: “5746,” Kameelah Janan Rasheed.

Gallery, TOPAZ Arts, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Leroy Neiman Gallery, etc.

Visit our Kickstarter today!

Anaïs Duplan is the director of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. She’s also the author of a forthcoming collection of poems, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016). Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Hyperallergic, [PANK], Birdfeast, Phantom Limb, Decoder Magazine, No Fear of Pop, and others. She’s also head of the artist collective, The Spacesuits, and an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she studies poetry.