New Histories, New Futures

This exhibition centers on three contemporary artists’ engagement with time and historical revisionism. Johnny Coleman (Oberlin, Ohio) revitalizes the marginalized history of one family’s journey on the Underground Railroad. His deep archival research on Lee Howard Dobbins, a four-year-old enslaved child whose journey north ended in illness and who was laid to rest in Oberlin in 1853, is the source of an ongoing series of large-scale installations. This exhibition will feature a new iteration of the series: an immersive installation that includes sculpture, sound, and projection. Antwoine Washington (Cleveland, Ohio) paints portraits of his own young family to counteract the stereotype of the absent Black father in a style that pays homage to artists of the Harlem Renaissance. The North Star series by Kambui Olujimi (New York, New York) features paintings and video of weightless, floating Black bodies “freed from the gravity of oppression,” imaging a future in which a politics of resistance can result in true bodily freedom. In these ways, the artists engage with the exhibition’s premise from standpoints rooted in the past, present, and future.