February 16, 2024 @ 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
February 16 – March 15, 2024
Opening Reception and Artists’ Talk: Friday, February 16, 12pm
VINCENNES, IN. – The Shircliff Gallery of Art at Vincennes University is proud to present In Blackest Shade, In Darkest Light, a traveling exhibition of seven Black American artists working in drawing.
Patrick Earl Hammie, Curator:
In Blackest Shade, In Darkest Light is an exhibition that centers around drawing as a technology from which artists speculate, recover, and collect communal histories, manifesting stories of desired futures from the margins of imagination into the realities of the everyday.
Drawing serves as an instant gateway for dreaming, recording, and sharing ideas. It moved from a mainly private practice to a form that asks questions as equally bold as other media. Today, artists utilize drawing as a method to hack into and build networks that engage across scholarship, art, and community.
The show’s title takes inspiration from DC’s Green Lantern Corps’ oath, “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might, beware my power, Green Lantern’s light,” from which members of the fictional space guardians access magical strength and gather the will to challenge adversaries using their imagination.
The artists in this exhibition revel in horror, Afro-futurism, magical realism, Ethno-gothic, fantasy, Black Quantum Futurism, utopias and dystopias, and superheroes. They draw from cultural aesthetics and philosophies of science and history to explore and improvise within set boundaries and beyond. Their work speculates toward un-fixing the physical, political, and social knowns and imagine otherwise how we will be and become.
Attached:
– Image: The Amazing Black-Man, 128, by Kumasi Barnett
– Image: Grace Jones, by Stacey Robinson
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