MY WORDS AND IMAGES FEATURED IN CHICAGO

There it is, behind the reflection of Josh Rios, a copy of High Aztech. And there's the back cover of Smoking Mirror Blues, and a couple of my articles, that I also illustrated, from Different Worlds. All on display, behind glass. What is this? Rios and Anthony Romero are putting together a display they call Is Our Future a Thing of the Past?, Part 3. It's all about Chicanafuturism. What's that? Maybe I should just give you the official version:

Is Our Future A Thing Of The Past

As part of their artist residency at Harold Washington College Anthony Romero and Josh Rios curated a set of glass cases on the 8th floor. The publications on display feature the work of Chicano illustrator and sci-fi novelist Ernest Hogan along side other artifacts and media that address ideas of Chicanafuturism in general.

Chicanafuturism, which Catherine Ramirez describes as fictive kin to Afrofuturism, attempts to make sense out of the relationship between the Chicana/o, science, and technology. As Ramirez points out, an increasingly key part of this framework is the ability to rethink brown cultural production through the lens of technology. If we read the Chicana/o as “a science fiction state of being,” which Hogan suggests, Ramirez asks us to consider the implications of such a reading for the overall “concepts of science, technology, civilization, progress, modernity, and the human.”

In addition, Romero and Rios organized a selection of drawings by Ernest Hogan to be on view on the 11th floor. These drawings feature a variety of images that celebrate and investigate the role that the Chicana/o has to cyberculture, technology, counterculture, and history. Each drawing is paired with a text, written by Hogan, that both describes the drawn scenes and opens them up to wider spheres of interpretation.

As part of the project Rios and Romero worked with a group of students to imagine various cosmologies, which were then used to produce images that functioned as ostensible book covers for novels not yet written. These cosmologies also served as the ground for a collaborative print project between the students and Romero and Rios. Based on their cosmologies, students submitted abstracts of the unwritten books that were then superimposed on the back of a pulp novel and printed for display. These images appear in both the glass cases on the 8th floor and on the 11th floor.

Opening reception: Wednesday, December 2, 2015 from 5:00 - 7:00 pm

Harold Washington College

30 E Lake St, Chicago, IL 60601

Check it out. It's the way the world is going. If your future is becoming a thing of the past, you better start building yourself a new one.

Also, anybody interested in buying any of my drawings, please get in touch.