The Institute of the Arts and Sciences is closed January 6–30, 2025 for installation.
Join us for an evening of short films by artists from across the African diaspora that engage the tropes of science fiction or magical realism to interrogate the past and imagine alternative futures. The screening will start at 7 p.m.
Since I Been Down tells the story of the impacts of the rising rates of incarceration on Tacoma, WA. The film is told through the eyes of a community impacted by lack of investment in resources and the fear-based policies of the 1980s and ‘90s that sacrificed and labeled their most-vulnerable children as irredeemable “super predators.”
We welcome students, faculty, and staff to join us for this Afrofuturism-themed outdoor film screening of Sun Ra's Space Is the Place, immediately followed by Janelle Monáe's visual album, Dirty Computer (Emotion Picture).
Arthur Jafa is an artist, director, editor, and award-winning cinematographer. His renowned work Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016) is a compilation of found footage set to Kanye West’s gospel-inspired hip-hop track “Ultralight Beam.” The meticulously edited seven-minute montage surveys African American identity and black experience through a vast spectrum of imagery, including well-known pictures from the civil rights era, recent scenes of police brutality, and iconic clips of extraordinary athleticism. For The White Album, Jafa shifts his lens to white experience, combining imagery from a wide array of sources, from music videos to confessionals posted to YouTube, to produce a trenchant examination of race relations in the United States. Jafa received the 2019 Golden Lion award for best artist in the Venice Biennale for The White Album.
