An event in the framework of "Shaping the Past"
We invite you to watch the artist talk about the Kansas City iteration of There Are Black People in the Future featuring Alisha B. Wormsley and the group of contributing Kansas City artists.
After the unveiling of Alisha B. Wormsley’s billboard reading “There Are Black People in the Future” in the Crossroads Arts District (Broadway & Pershing), the Goethe Pop Up, together with Wormsley, invited nine local BIPOC artists to react to this billboard through visuals and text. These diverse works of art were installed across the entire Pop Up’s window front to be experienced from the outside since October. The exhibition front on glass presents works of art by
Izsys Archer,
Jessica Ayala,
Arianna Bonner,
Mona Cliff,
José Faus,
Sheri Purpose Hall,
Glyneisha Johnson,
Jada Patterson, and
Harold Smith.
On October 18th, we welcomed the contributing artists together with Wormsley for a virtual artist talk where they discussed the Kansas City iteration of
There Are Black People in the Future and their visions of how to imagine Black futures.
The talk was moderated by
Kreshaun McKinney, Manager of Audience Engagement at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
There Are Black People in the Future is an afro-futurist body of work by interdisciplinary artist Alisha B. Wormsley which includes video, prints, collages, sculptures, and billboards. In 2018, Wormsley placed these words on a billboard in East Liberty, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s east end that has suffered gentrification. When the billboard was removed by the city, community members protested. For Wormsley, its removal transformed this sentence into a movement, one in which the public was encouraged to use her words for the betterment of the world around them.
Shaping the Past is a partnership between the Goethe-Institut, Monument Lab, and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education). The project connects to the activist and artistic work of local, national, and transnational movements as a reflection of memory culture and discusses new perspectives on forms of memory.
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