Curating the End of the World, Part I

Chloe Harrison’s works reflect the desire to remain isolated and make work that is conceptual. Yet her practice also grapples with the tension between making work that has no meaning, necessarily, and closing out her college career as she faces an unforeseen future within a pandemic.

Patrick Earl Hammie's work examines personal and shared black diasporic experiences. Through portraits and allegories, Hammie explores the complexities of identity, emotion, and family by layering existing histories with new narratives, navigating the tensions between feeling and knowledge, power and violence, vulnerability and tenderness.

Here, Jessi Jumani's Range Rover is paired with Ingrid LaFleur's sound essay, Traveling to Turiya--a meditation on the ways in which travel across time and space inflect how we see and experience the world.

Detroit-born artist Alice Coltrane's jazz composition Galaxy in Turiya inspired this sound essay. Commissioned by the Arcus Center for Social Justice at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, the piece was first exhibited in 2017 along with an installation of multiple sculptures made from healing crystals. Since then the essay has been presented in a number of venues around the world. The essay includes samples from speeches and literary passages by Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Sun Ra and the Arkestra, and Eartha Kitt.

FireWriter commemorates events that took place during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri. To create this work, Nettrice Gaskins collaborated with Deep Dream, an online tool that uses machine learning to generate images. Gaskins employs this process, also referred to as deep neural image style transfer, to showcase in her work the capabilities and internal representations of new and emerging technology.

This and the next digital illustration are pages from the forthcoming graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.

BLACKMAU is the art moniker of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Art + Design Professor Stacey “Blackstar” Robinson and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Clinical Services Counselor (DJ) Kamau “KamauMau” Grantham. The duo deploys strategies of appropriation and what they call "unperfected experimentation." This collaboratively-made image conjures Black dystopian survival via photographic fragments, deep house music, and Afrofuturism.

This and the next digital illustration are pages from Nnedi Okorafor's forthcoming novel, After the Rain. Okorafor is a Nigerian-American author of Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism for children and adults.

Created during a live virtual event on Instagram, this mixed media image considers the new 'normal' of wearing masks and the conditions of looking this new normal might produce.

Ottawa-based artist William Falby crafts his images using software designed to manipulate the extremes of light, color, shape, and everything in between. Through electronic imaging, Falby explores issues of identity, migration, and language, and his compositions often take the forms of masks.

Krank Shaft is a space marine and steampunk alternative weapons engineer, a character that the artist created and introduced at the Steampunk World's Fair in New York in 2017.

This portrait combines steampunk and comic book culture. An homage to Serbian-American inventor, Nikola Tesla, the artist replicates and transforms the mask that the Hellboy character wears to evoke the divide between the supernatural and the human.