Curatorial: 2016 - Black Pulp

Black Pulp is an unprecedented overview of over 90 years of Black image production by Black publishers, Black artists and by nonBlack artists and publishers allied with foregrounding the Black experience. Many works on view offer up windows into the darker, erotic, satirical, and more absurd recesses of the Black popular imagination; while underscoring important debates around personhood and identity. The exhibition explores the creative and strategic use of printed media such as small run magazines, fiction novels, posters and comic books to challenge racist narratives and change limited notions of Black experience. Also important are brilliant writers and scholars such as W.E.B Dubois, Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Carter G. Woodson, Sadie lloa Daniel, Gertrude Parthenia McBrown and Zora Neal Hurston amongst many others whom have contributed to the publications on view. Through fiction, nonfiction, cultural criticism, poetry, prose and playwriting these rigorous thinkers have narrated the struggles and dreams of a people forged in the darkness of chattel slavery, their freedom despised by many and whom's descendants continue to shine the light of creativity and wit in the face of this history.

Black Pulp is on a national tour 2016-18 going to Yale School of Art, IPCNY, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Wesleyan University, and African American Museum in Philadelphia.