Krista Franklin is one of the artists in Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination, Schomburg Center, Harlem, until January 16, 2016.
Androids, Dream of How People are Sheep, 2014.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work straddles the literary and visual worlds. As a writer and mixed media artist, I create complex, interrogative images that reflect the vernacular experiences, dream worlds, and psychic landscapes of the black community in the United States and larger African Diaspora.
My art has a strong focus on subtext. I often utilize distinct, recognizable and familiar images of people of color, popular iconography, and the juxtaposition of text to engage the viewer and deconstruct the ways in which our gaze reifies and distorts notions of culture and gender, race and class, power and privilege.
Money Folder, 2012.
I am deeply inspired by popular culture and public history, as well as by the frenetic glamour of music videos and magazines. Using a variety of mixed media — acrylic, watercolor, handmade paper and found objects: old letters, vintage magazine advertisements, playing cards, old photographs, and receipts — I work to create “post-modern” American totems wherein the complexities of our present and our past(s) are evoked through purposeful layering.
See Line Woman, 2011.
African Diaspora folklore and mythmaking are the conceptual concerns of my current visual explorations. Informed by the gothic fugitive slave narrative of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the shapeshifter, telepathic, and dystopic visions of Octavia E. Butler, and the elaborate collages of Romare Bearden, my recent work in papermaking, letterpress and bookmaking explore retro-Afro-Futuristic and Afro-Surrealist themes of the “fantastic” and the “speculative”.
Afro Pic Yan, 2012.
About the exhibition
Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination is sure to satisfy the sci-fi/fantasy nerd in all of us. Curated by artist John Jennings and Reynaldo Anderson, this exhibition includes artifacts from the Schomburg collections that are connected to Afrofuturism, black speculative imagination and Diasporan cultural production. Offering a fresh perspective on the power of speculative imagination and the struggle for various freedoms of expression in popular culture, Unveiling Visions showcases illustrations and other graphics that highlight those popularly found in science fiction, magical realism and fantasy. Items on display include film posters, comics, t-shirts, magazines, CD covers, playbills, religious literature, and more.(text website Schomburg Center)