![Astro](/sites-drupal/default/files/styles/max_scale_640x640/public/field_ers_item_record_image/2021-04/D81_3718.jpg?itok=PUOO1GNW)
Astro-Blackness
For people of African descent, it is a an audacious and emboldened notion to envision a collective future. For generations, amidst trauma and oppression, the very idea of a “black future” has been, at the very least, an oxymoronic phrase. Writer Rev. Andrew Rollins describes AstroBlackness as an “... Afrofuturistic concept in which a person's Black state of consciousness, released from the confining and crippling slave or colonial mentality, becomes aware of the multitude and varied possibilities and probabilities within the universe.” The works of Samuel R. Delany, Walter Moseley, Octavia Butler, Nisi Shawl, Steven Barnes, and many others, provide the guiding map towards this bright black future. These writers serve as galactic griots, sharing their data with every turn of a phrase. AstroBlackness is about transcendence and becoming a complete and whole individual. An AstroBlack body is a subjective, nuanced, and flexible one. It denies the fixity of the stereotypical chains put upon it by others and itself. It’s about not only seeing the possibility, but also about becoming the possibility.
Installation Image by Roy Rochlin. Latimer/Edison Gallery, Schomburg Center