Contested Space(s): Cathode-Ray Tube Afrofuturism

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

With cameras pointed toward the skies, historically, the television lens has framed the aspirations and triumphs of America’s space program as a largely patriotic, mostly homogeneous final frontier. Concurrently, amid the fanfare of rockets and moon shots, artists of vision and conscience have disrupted such regularly scheduled TV programming to contest the cool medium’s status-quo constructions of race, space and place. Breaking the barriers of the cathode-ray tube, these counter-narratives expand the small screen universe, centering African Americans in humankind’s reaching endeavors to explore strange new worlds. Through poetry, music and allegorical drama, this assembly of provocative broadcasts explicates unjust conditions on Earth while challenging the mythos of a benevolent, star-spangled militaryindustrial complex that serves as gatekeeper to the galaxies.

Curation and notes by Mark Quigley.