Presented by CulturalDC as part of Torrents: New Links to Black Futures

From Atlanta to Venus

Curated by Lisa Osborne

November 15 - 17, 2024

Umbrella Art Fair

Dock5 - 1309 5th Street NE, Suite B

Washington, DC 20002

RSVP not required.

From Atlanta to Venus presents portraits of Black beings, real and imagined. Black knights. Black kings. Black gods. Such simple ideas, yet the average movie fan would be hard pressed to name three examples of each in post-World War II science fiction and fantasy, without running to the internet for help. A single Marvel movie has more white deities in it than the number of noteworthy on-screen Black gods in the last 75 years of popular film and television. 

Curator Lisa Osborne observes that there are no Black equivalents to Princess Leia (1977), Guinevere (1136), or Daenerys Targaryen (1996), in terms of cultural impact and global character recognition. Why is that? 

It’s not just about who gets to be a princess. It’s about who gets to create the future. Whose ideas about the future have consistently received funding, resources, praise, institutional stamps of approval, awards, and exhibition? In the next 25 years, whose speculative ideas about technology and ‘civilization’ will receive worldwide distribution in the form of popular games and films? Landing a development deal for a screenplay or a novel is a type of endorsement. As is booking an exhibition or a screening or receiving a nomination. You don’t even have to win. The nomination is a tacit form of endorsement by professional peers, critics, or academics that your ideas are worthy of consideration, are a cut above the rest, and have value. 

Similarly, Black people in nonfiction media—documentaries, reality TV, and the news—have fared no better than their fictitious cousins and are frequently a type of fiction themselves. Every form of screen-based storytelling has developed its own tropes governing how Black people are depicted. Rarely are Black characters the astronaut, the cowboy, the captain, the class president, the soldier, the spy, the detective, the tech genius, the superhero, the wizard, or the queen. Rarely do Black people save the day on screen. Rarely are we the hero or antihero. In modern media, those kinds of heroic and complex archetypes are still reserved, overwhelmingly, for white characters.

But what happens when Black people are the ones doing the imagining? When we design our own worlds, what do we create? In this exhibition, Black artists, filmmakers, and technologists gleefully stretch and bend Black identity, transforming each experimental portrait into a joyful and, sometimes, sly protest against the flattening of Black people and culture on screen.

Artists Featured

Lisa Osborne

Curator, Flying Horse Studio

Producer Lisa Osborne (@julipeno) specializes in immersive and experimental media and art. Osborne recently launched Flying Horse Studio (flyinghorsestudio.xyz), which specializes in producing content and events that combine art, experimental film, and immersive technology. Two throughlines of her work are exploring gaps in the historical record and examining how pop culture invents new technologies and mainstreams ideas about our shared future. Both strands reflect her early-career focus on journalism after graduating from Northwestern University. 

At Black Public Media (BPM), a film nonprofit in New York, Osborne manages an international roster of filmmakers and artists, who create innovative work that combines multiple types of media, including film, photography, gaming, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and motion capture. She curates BPM’s PitchBLACK Immersive Forum, an annual  $75K pitch competition for creative technology projects. 

Previously, Osborne worked for adidas, American Film Institute, Turner Network Television, and Sundance on everything from film festivals to World Cups. Recent collaborators include TORRENTS: New Links to Black Futures, the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Open Documentary Lab at MIT. She was an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an immersive juror for the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. She is a founding member of Black Innovation Alliance (blackinnovationalliance.com).