His art exhibits pride, boldness, limitlessness. They’re proud and cognizant of their DNA, meshing the beauty of being with the beauty of prospect. Robert’s drawings operate similarly, interweaving tales spanning a massive, egalitarian continuum. The story is the story-if it’s good, and the medium tells it well, next question. Seeing a titan like Delany in The Polymath not giving a shit about format was illuminating. I was already a deep, deep nerd with science fiction, comic books, video games, etc, but had a weird qualm regarding my nerdship-a shame, a hesitancy. Delany’s Dhalgren was the second book we read, and I became obsessed, so Fred leant me his copy of the doc. In undergrad, I took a class by poet, theorist, and recently-christened Guggenheim genius Fred Moten. P Michael and I felt a kindred tug viewing Robert’s art, and news of the current exhibition sounded the siren of familiarity-for one, travis’ visual work appeared alongside Robert’s at a Hyde Park Art Center exhibition called Interstellar Low Ways back in 2006-2007, celebrating the life of visionary Saturnian jazz composer Sun Ra for a second, our creations pull strands from a similar tapestry-a democratized rolodex of storytelling and artistic formats.įor me, this crystallized while watching the Samuel Delany documentary The Polymath. Robert Pruitt’s work is alive, joyous, and often speculative, pulling from Black American life, history, science fiction, music, comic books, film, the natural world, and more. Being alive and Black in the United States is political in itself, and being joyous and Black in the United States is revolutionary. For Black artists like travis, and our bandleader P Michael Grego, being political isn’t an option. “Otherwise, it’s just a pretty thing,” he explains. “All art is political.” That’s a saying from my bandmate in ONO, frontperson and visual artist travis-a seventy-four-year-old queer, Black veteran from Mississippi.

The Beauty of Being, The Beauty of Prospect

Beaux mendes ad infinitum