Futuristic Sculptural Objects with Artist Sylvia Weir

In this art workshop artist Sylvia R. Weir facilitated a fun and colorful sculptural intro to Afro-futurism. Use found objects to create your afrofuturistic sculpture. Space is the place to create so close your eyes and imagine your own ship.
Supplies:
- cardboard
- glitter paper
- stickers
- patterned paper
- cellophane
- tacky glue/ glue gun (for adults)

According to Wikipedia: Afrofuturism can be identified in artistic, scientific, and spiritual practices throughout the African diaspora. Contemporary practice retroactively identifies and documents historical instances of Afrofuturist practice and integrates them into the canon. Examples are the Dark Matter anthologies, which feature contemporary Black sci-fi, but also include older works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, and George S. Schuyler. Since the term was introduced in 1994, self-identified Afrofuturist practice has become increasingly ubiquitous. The afrofuturist approach to music was first propounded by the late Sun Ra. Born in Alabama, Sun Ra's music coalesced in Chicago in the mid-1950s, when he and his Arkestra began recording music that drew from hard bop and modal sources, but created a new synthesis which also used afrocentric and space-themed titles to reflect Ra's linkage of ancient African culture, specifically Egypt, and the cutting edge of the Space Age. Ra's film Space Is the Place shows the Arkestra in Oakland in the mid-1970s in full space regalia, with a lot of science fiction imagery as well as other comedic and musical material.

Afrofuturist ideas were taken up in 1975 by George Clinton and his bands Parliament and Funkadelic with his magnum opus Mothership Connection and the subsequent The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, P Funk Earth Tour, Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome, and Motor Booty Affair. In the thematic underpinnings to P-Funk mythology ("pure cloned funk"), Clinton in his alter ego Starchild spoke of "certified Afronauts, capable of funkitizing galaxies."

William Gibson's Neuromancer describes Zion, a Rastafarian space station populated by exiles of Earth, and dwelling of Maelcum, a Dub aficionado and one of the novel's main characters.

Other musicians typically regarded as working in or greatly influenced by the Afrofuturist tradition include reggae producers Lee "Scratch" Perry and Scientist, hip-hop artistsAfrika Bambaataa and Tricky, and electronic musicians Larry Heard, A Guy Called Gerald, Juan Atkins and Jeff Mills.^[4]

In the early 1990s, a number of cultural critics, notably Mark Dery in his 1994 essay Black to the Future, began to write about the features they saw as common in African-American science fiction, music and art. Dery dubbed this phenomenon afrofuturism. According to cultural critic Kodwo Eshun, British journalist Mark Sinker was theorizing a form of Afrofuturism in the pages of The Wire, a British music magazine, as early as 1992.^{[citation needed]}

Afrofuturist ideas have further been expanded by scholars like Alondra Nelson, Greg Tate, Tricia Rose, Kodwo Eshun, and others.^[2] In an interview, Alondra Nelson explained Afrofuturism as a way of looking at the subject position of black people which covers themes of alienation and aspirations for a utopic future. The idea of 'alien' or 'other' is a theme often explored.^[5] Additionally, Nelson notes that discussions around race, access, and technology often bolster uncritical claims about a so-called “digital divide”.^[6] The digital divide overemphasizes the association of racial and economic inequality with limited access to technology. This association then begins to construct blackness "as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress".^[6] As a critique of the neo-critical argument that the future’s history-less identities will end burdensome stigma, Afrofuturism holds that history should remain apart of identity, particularly in terms of race.^[6]