Picture Theory is pleased to present Mad Black Phantasms, a group show curated by Evyn Bileri Banawoye. This exhibition incites a visual survey into madness as an outburst of radical hope, hurling us into another world. Madness is contextualized as a way of relating and constructing identity, a “mad methodology.” Mad Black Phantasms offers an anti-disciplinary collaboration on the intersections of Black Personhood, Black Queerness, and Black Liberation. This Mad Black Phenomenon becomes Phantasm to illuminate the Black existence as The Other and The Outcast.

Black artists communally persist to make themselves and their experiences known to the world and most importantly–to each other. In addition, these artists explore madness as a lived reality rather than a phantom, calling for the extension of radical compassion to “unvoiced bodies and unReasonable others.” Mad expresses the chaotic atmosphere of the world. Mad describes the condition in which Black people’s lives are made into global spectacle due to the technological and surveillance advancements of the 21st century.

The exhibition’s ironic title references La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s meditations on madness explored in his book, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind. In the case of Black alterity, Black artists have engaged with the tangible madness of multiplicity resulting in famous protest music and art by Nina Simone, Sun Ra, Amiri Baraka, Kerry James Marshall, and more.

Diomande’s Blurred Lines (I chase you down with an axe) engages with motion to convey the insta- bility of madness. While Adeyemo’s Witness Altarpiece, “made of rejected by-products” confronts power with truth and illuminates our contemporary yet dystopian role of ‘witness’ to ongoing global and domestic liberation struggles.’ In conversation with Gopee’s video installation, An Excision Spell is an “intra-communal call to arms” against white supremacist violence. And in the witnessing of our bleak reality, Souleye Fall embraces madness by engaging with color and possibility, where green becomes a landscape for Black futures.

Whether examining the self or their Black multiplicity, these artists utilize what is and grounds ‘what has yet to be.’ Mad Black Phantasms becomes a site where reality is illustrated and Black futures are forged.

– Evyn Bileri Banawoye
Editors: Ava Marshall, Elijah Smith, Melany Canela