Colored People Time: Mundane Futures

Conceived by Meg Onli, assistant curator at ICA, Colored People Time challenges the traditional exhibitions structure and format to initiate a profound exploration into the banal and everyday ways in which the history of slavery and colonialism permeates the present and impacts the future. Broken into three separate chapters—Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, and Banal Presents—which will open consecutively over the course of 2019, the exhibition explores how the subjugation of black people in America was not only part of our country’s foundation, but exists within our present moment, and shapes our future. 

Colored People Time will feature a range of emerging and established artists including Aria Dean, Kevin Jerome Everson, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Carolyn Lazard, Dave McKenzie, Martine Syms, Sable Elyse Smith, and Cameron Rowland.

On view from February 1 – March 31, 2019, the first chapter of the exhibition, Mundane Futures, aims to develop a discourse around the future of black cultural production. Attempting to look beyond science fiction and fantasy, the exhibition will peer into a future focused on the ordinary through the lens of four contemporary artists: Martine Syms, Kevin Jerome Everson, Aria Dean and Dave McKenzie. 

Syms’ film The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (2015) will create a loose framework for the exhibition that imagines a future as a continuation of the present, comprised of banal and ordinary experiences in a society that continues to struggle with white supremacy and racial injustice. The exhibition seeks to ground Sym’s thinking with two historic texts: Sutton Griggs’ 1899 black dystopian novel Imperium in Imperio, and The Ten-Point Program published in the 1972 issue of The Black Panther. Both literary works will contextualize the mundane future within the past, creating a tangible link that ties the concept to the history of blackness in America.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website