Selection of Black Thoughts: Digital Collages and Drawings by Stacey Robinson
Selection of Black Thoughts is a collection of pieces from several series that document thematic prompts of surreal Black futures. Although each piece has its own narrative, much can be left to audience interpretation. These works are digital collages and drawings that obscure the fantastic. Imagine Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone as a Black space where the colonial ideas around Blackness must be contended with and reconciled, and where there is no escape from the Blackness of space. Fears and fantasies collide in this Black imaginative space rooted in the darkness of opulent collage.
Stacey Robinson is an Assistant Professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was a 2019-2020 Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research who completed his Masters of Fine Art at the University at Buffalo. For the last several years he has traveled internationally discussing the complexities decolonized future spaces. As one half of the collaborative team Black Kirby with artist John Jennings, Stacey creates graphic novels, gallery exhibitions, lectures, and workshops that use world-building strategies to imagine new worlds inspired by Design, Hip-Hop, the Arts and Sciences, and diasporic African belief systems. His latest graphic novels include I Am Alfonso Jones by Tony Medina (2017), available from Lee & Low Books; and Across the Tracks: Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre by Alverne Ball (2021), available from Abrams Books.
Exhibition Run
February 1 – March 31, 2022
Artists’ Alley, 809 S 5th St, Champaign
Open between 9 AM and 8 PM daily