In Shaper of God, American Artist harnesses the speculative knowledge and eternal presence of Afrofuturist icon Octavia E. Butler. The exhibition, at present at Pioneer Works, is well timed; it’s no secret that Butler precisely predicted that 2025 could be a 12 months of ecological and political disaster in her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. Participating with the notion of in any other case worlds in Artist’s multimedia installations makes it obvious that we should reply to our cataclysmic second with Butler’s ingenuity.
Artist’s exhibition reads partly as a much-needed love letter to Butler. Unfold throughout the spacious pink brick constructing are architectural, archival, and screen-based installations that handle essential problems with resilience and futurity. A bus cease with a base that resembles an agave plant recollects each Butler’s lifelong use of public transportation and the protecting agave vegetation bordering the protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina’s compound in Parable.
Set up view of American Artist: Shaper of God at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn. Left: “Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy” (2024); proper: “To Acorn (1984)” (2023) (courtesy Pioneer Works)
Artist has hand-traced intimate ephemera like doodles, bus schedules, and maps from Butler’s institutional archive at California’s Huntington Library. Artist’s drawings and notes are displayed in vitrines on one facet of the bus cease. On the opposite facet is a sculptural reimagining of a hen coop based mostly on Butler’s grandmother’s ranch in Apple Valley, California. The coop is crammed with archival bins harking back to containers holding Butler’s archive on the Huntington. That Butler’s archive is represented inside her household hen coop suggests how her radiant legacy is intertwined with the resilience in her maternal lineage. Butler’s mom and grandmother created a house on new land after shifting to California in the course of the Nice Migration.
A collection of movies on view current speculative illustrations of components from Parable. Within the two-channel video “The Monophobic Response” (2024), a gaggle of artists, students, and scientists act out a rocket check based mostly on Earthseed, a gaggle of local weather refugees who’re attempting to “take root among the stars.” Filmed within the Mojave Desert, we witness the group performing scientific calculations and see their enthusiasm about fleeing Earth for his or her subsequent cease — house.
Set up view of American Artist: Shaper of God at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn. Pictured: “The Monophobic Response (Film, 2CH)” (2024), two-channel HD video with sound (photograph Alexandra M. Thomas/Hyperallergic)
Parable of the Sower was set in a post-apocalyptic United States that mirrors the authoritarianism and precarity of our present second. Butler knew California wildfires would develop extra devastating with time, and in a harrowing twist, Artist’s former dwelling in Altadena burned down in January 2025. Infinite questions arose for me whereas viewing Artist’s exploration and appreciation of Butler. What would it not imply for the survival of the planet if we have been to take severely Black feminist visions of local weather justice during which coexistence with nature is prioritized over environmental plunder? How may one thing like house journey be liberated from the world of Elon Musk sorts and as an alternative be stewarded by marginalized communities? Can a inventive and futuristic mix of resistance methods rescue us from the fascist megalomaniacs in energy at this time? Artist’s phenomenal work carries us towards Butler’s endlessly pressing blueprint to surviving disaster.
American Artist, “Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy,” element (2024), wooden, paint, rusted metal, archival bins (courtesy Pioneer Works)
Set up view of seating space in American Artist: Shaper of God at Pioneer Works, screening “Alicia Catalina Godinez Leal” (2024), single-channel HD video with sound (photograph Alexandra M. Thomas/Hyperallergic)
American Artist, “The Monophobic Response (sculpture)” (2024), metal, methanol, oxygen, tanks, sandbags, hoses, paper, pencil (courtesy Pioneer Works)
Set up view of American Artist: Shaper of God at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (courtesy Pioneer Works)
American Artist: Shaper of God continues at Pioneer Works (159 Pioneer Road, Pink Hook, Brooklyn) by way of April 13. The exhibition was curated by Vivian Chui.
