Kambui Olujimi’s multidisciplinary practice implicates viewers in imagining the world otherwise, often through elements drawn from history and everyday life. Addressing the deliberate absence of Black joy in Western art histories and visual culture in his newest project North Star, Olujimi asks: What does the Black body, freed from the gravity of white supremacy, look like? What is the Black body in zero gravity?

 

Organized by SJMA, Kambui Olujimi: North Star will bring together Olujimi’s multimedia inquiry into the liberatory possibilities of weightlessness, a concept he has explored since 2019 as an alternative to the structuring forces of white supremacy. Aligned with our pledge to inspire creativity, visionary inquiry, and critical thinking, SJMA’s presentation of North Star will create a generative triangulation of art, science, and philosophy to contend with the precarity of life on this planet and imagine life otherwise in the universe. Olujimi’s inquiries into plurality and multiplicity in North Star resonate with California’s rich counterculture history, particularly as encapsulated by the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, an organization founded in the 1960s dedicated to humanistic alternative education. Using space as a point of departure to create a new context for Blackness and being, North Star also resonates to the research work of the Ames Research Center, a NASA field center in Silicon Valley. OWhat does the Black body, freed from the gravity of white supremacy, look like? Kambui Olujimi: North Star is an immersive exhibition that features Kambui Olujimi’s inquiry into the liberatory possibilities of weightlessness, a concept he has explored since 2019 as an alternative to the structuring forces of anti-Black racism. Olujimi’s projects implicate viewers in reimagining what is possible, often through elements drawn from history and everyday life.

 

North Star brings together a selection of large-scale watercolor and ink paintings, a site-specific mural, a film, and a new audiovisual installation. These works collectively imagine what new relationships we might chart between our bodies, the self, the planet, and the universe once deeply entrenched forces are destabilized and replaced by boundlessness and possibility.

 

Olujimi’s recent project, North Star: Meditations on Weightlessness, grapples with gravity as a metaphor for white supremacy and as a structuring physical force. The exhibition consists of paintings, a mural, a video, and an audiovisual installation. Olujimi’s large-scale watercolor and ink paintings, in which nude figures float freely in nebulous spaces, were begun while he was an inaugural fellow in Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock residency in 2019. This exhibition will gather a selection of these and new paintings atop a site-specific wall mural, providing additional context for Olujimi’s imaginings of the multiplicity and boundlessness possible in zero-gravity. A centerpiece of the exhibition is a new film about a parabolic flight on which the artist invited people from the African diaspora to experience weightlessness. In addition to footage of the flight, the video will feature post-flight interviews and footage of the Ames Research Center and related sites. A version of this work debuted at the Lincoln Center in New York in October 2023. The exhibition will also include a new audiovisual installation which will provide a simulation of the weightlessness experienced by the subjects in Olujimi’s film. Collectively, the works in this exhibition invite us to imagine what new relationships we might chart between our bodies, the self, the planet, and the universe once deeply entrenched forces are destabilized and replaced by boundlessness and possibility.

 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a major artist book, designed by Melissa Gorman, published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., and distributed by Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. Kambui Olujimi: North Star is organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator, and Juan Omar Rodriguez, assistant curator.

 

See the exhibit playlist and look at the Andy Warhol Museum Interview at about 42 minutes, the Brown University again around 42 minutes Olujimi talks about North Star.

For the Press Release use the Brown Bag Button