Watch the live stream here:
Join Center for Afrofuturist Studies artist-in-residence Antoine Williams for a livestreamed conversation with cultural organizer LaTanya Autry and scholar/educator Tiffany Holland.
Antoine Williams' project Black Fusionist Society (BFS) is a collaborative effort in historical fiction storytelling based off of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898. The goal of this project is to create contemporary digital Black folklore that lives online. The text and imagery found here are the foundation to the BFS narrative. Writers and artists are invited to use the imagery and text provided as inspiration to create an online Black Fusionist Society mythos. The work will be posted online with the hashtag #blackfusionistsociety
This project is made possible through generous support from the VIA Art Fund | Wagner Foundation Incubator Grant Fund and VIA Grantee Emergency Fund, and the Iowa Arts Council Emergency Relief Grant.
As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, LaTanya S. Autry centers Black liberation and decolonization in her work. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that both promotes public discussion about the Black liberation struggle and engenders fighting antiBlackness through the collective imagining of public art interventions, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums and the Social Justice and Museums Resource List, a crowd-sourced bibliography.
LaTanya has curated exhibitions and organized programs at moCa Cleveland, Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, and other institutions. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, LaTanya has developed expertise in the art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.
J. Tiffany Holland is a PhD Candidate in U.S. History at Duke University. Her research focuses on black racial formation, U.S. empire, and working-class identities. She is currently a professor of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Guilford College and UNC-Greensboro.
Antoine Williams' mixed-media work investigates his cultural identity by exploring power, fear and the perception of signs within society. Heavily influenced by science fiction, and his rural, working-class upbringing in Red Springs, North Carolina, Antoine has created his own mythology about the complexities of contemporary Black life. An artist-educator, Antoine received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and his MFA from UNC Chapel Hill. He helped start the God City Art Collective in Charlotte, where he participated in a number of socially engaged, community-based art projects, such as pop-up art shows, afterschool art programs, underground rap shows, and film festivals. He has exhibited at the Mint Museum of Art, Michigan State University, Columbia Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, 21c Museum, as well as many other venues. He is also a recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Award of Painters and Sculptors. Williams is an assistant professor of art at Guilford College