SECOND WAVE: Aesthetics of the 80s in Today’s Contemporary Art explores the influences of the artistic styles and subject matter from the artists in the 1980s on a new generation of artists, who were born or raised in the 80s, and have expressed the importance of this decade from nearly thirty years ago on their own work. While the exhibition will not include works by the artists from the 1980s, it will feature works by contemporary artists who have expressed how the 1980s has impacted their own work. The exhibition will be organized loosely around aesthetic trajectories that are identified with the 1980s, such as Appropriation, Feminism, Graffiti Art, Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geo, Mass Media, and Multiculturalism. One note of distinction is that these artists have established their careers in Los Angeles and the southern California region. This is meant as a purposeful counterpoint to the careers of the artists in the 1980s that were established in the New York art world. Although, several studied in Los Angeles schools, such as California Institute of the Arts and UCLA, they then departed for the city where careers were being made at the time. However, it was in the 1990s and 2000s that Los Angeles’ stature rose on an international level; a sentiment that underscores the selection of artists in SECOND WAVE.

SECOND WAVE: Aesthetics of the 80s in Today’s Contemporary Art is organized by UCR ARTS and curated by Jennifer Frias, former Associate Curator, Sweeney Art Gallery. UCR’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) and the City of Riverside have provided support for the exhibition.

Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas was on view September 16, 2017 – March 18, 2018.

A wide-ranging survey exhibition, it brings together contemporary artists from across the Americas who have tapped into science fiction’s capacity to imagine new realities, both utopian and dystopian. Science fiction offers a unique artistic landscape in which to explore the colonial enterprise that shaped the Americas and to present alternative perspectives speculating on the past and the future. In the works featured in the exhibition, most created in the last two decades, artists employ the imagery of science fiction to suggest diverse modes of existence and represent “alienating” ways of being in the world. Drawing on UCR’s strong faculty and collections in science fiction, the exhibition offers a groundbreaking account of the intersections among science fiction, techno-culture, and the visual arts.

Mundos Alternos is curated by Robb Hernández, Assistant Professor of English at UCR; Tyler Stallings, former Artistic Director of the Culver Center of the Arts; and Joanna Szupinska-Myers, Senior Curator of Exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography. Kathryn Poindexter, former CMP Assistant Curator, was Project Manager.

Mundos Alternos is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, took place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions from Santa Barbara to San Diego, and from Los Angeles to Palm Springs. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

Major support for this exhibition was provided through grants from the Getty Foundation.

Additional support was provided by UCR’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS), and the City of Riverside.

REFLECTION ETERNAL: The CANDYMAN Illustrated Syllabus was on view from August 31, 2019 to January 19, 2020.

Since the premiere of the first Candyman film in 1992, Clive Barker’s titular character has haunted the dreams and nightmares of an entire generation. The dark, violent, and romantic apparition has given us an index for projections of monstrosity and desire for black bodies.

Reflection Eternal: The Candyman Illustrated Syllabus, from the Black Kirby duo, explores the various possible social meanings of this haunted and horrifying spirit via a collection of installations, digital media, and printed artwork.

These explorations are executed by the Mother Boxx Collective; a cooperative of talented artists and designers who operate as an extension of Black Kirby and their pedagogical and culturally situated activist work. Black Kirby is also joined in Reflection Eternal by long-time collaborator Damian Duffy to form what the trio calls TAN LEE. Duffy is a New York Times best-selling author, Eisner Comics Award winner, and holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is on faculty.

BLACK KIRBY is a collaborative “entity” that is Stacey Robinson (Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and Illustration, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) and John Jennings (Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside). Black Kirby utilizes the device of the alter ego as a symbolic allegory for W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of “double-consciousness”. It functions as a rhetorical tool by appropriating the bold forms and energetic ideas of comics legend Jack Kirby combined with themes centered around Afrofuturism, social justice, representation, magical realism, and by using the culture of Hip Hop as a methodology for creating visual communication. Their work samples from Kirby’s style but also remixes it with the formal and conceptual influences from many other artists, pop culture, and artistic expressions through a variety of techniques such as bricolage, pastiche, oppositional juxtapositions, and deconstruction. Black Kirby expands the language of comics from artistic medium to conceptual crossroads to examine identity as a socialized notion. It is the artists’ hope to destabilize various ideas of “blackness” in order to promote a broader spectrum of black subjectivity. Their practice is largely informed by the theoretical construction Critical Race Design Studies.

Reflection Eternal: The Candyman Illustrated Syllabus is the second artist project from Black Kirby (John Jennings & Stacey Robinson) to inhabit UCR ARTS’ f/stop gallery, following Uncaged: Hero for Higher in Fall 2018. UCR ARTS periodically issues an invitation to create an artist project and in the past artists have engaged with our collections and objects, ideas and galleries, to create a personal response in the form of an exhibition.

Reflection Eternal runs parallel to a course on Afrofuturism and the Visual Cultures of Horror taught by John Jennings at UC Riverside and Stacey Robinson’s Nas Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University for the 2019-2020 academic year. The exhibition highlights the inextricable link between Black Kirby’s artistic and pedagogical practice, thus expanding the notion of an artist project and transforming the gallery from an exhibition space to an illustrated syllabus or illabus. Reflection Eternal is organized by 10 weekly prompts that guide you through the themes and topics expressed in the artworks of Black Kirby, TAN LEE, and the Mother Boxx Collective. The weekly prompts, along with the installed bibliography, provide the context and grounding for the exhibition as well as an invitation for dialogue, discussion, and further investigation.