“Conversation: Black Imaginaries.” Critical Productive Journal, Issue No. 3 (Summer 2026)
Excerpt from the text:
"This conversation on Non-Space / Resistance, the theme for this journal issue, explores your new park, sister dreamer, ode to the surge n splurge of south central los angeles, which I have had the great privilege of working on as curator working with Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). I am interested in Milton Curry’s proposal to consider non-space and junkspace, which emerged over the past hundred years or so of modernization and urbanization, looking at the ubiquity of ambiguous, semi-functional spaces—such as empty lots, abandoned industrial areas, gas stations, malls, casinos, airport lounges, and theme parks. I’d like to explore the non-space of the empty lot on 76th and Western Avenue in South Central Los Angeles, the ways in which urban space, visual culture, art, architecture, nature, time, human activity, and leisure constitute resistance (politically, socially, economically, and in other ways) in the present tense. It evades systems and determines its own validity.
Beyond being speculative and utopian, sister dreamer expands the Black imaginary—past, present, and future. It supports multiple temporalities such as your personal history with the neighborhood, important moments in music and art, Black visual culture, and South Central. Your work honors folks living today—not just through memorialization of the past—in ways that enable joy, appreciation, and respect for a people who are alive and continue to thrive. Integrating the trees and the plants, all derived [from] what has been native to that block for millennia, is also a way of elevating life in the present tense. A temporary park space, sister dreamer will be open for eighteen months. While the dream would be to have this park space open to the public in perpetuity, there is a kind of radicality in its elusivity, in creating moments of escape to somewhere else that is entirely familiar, while the park has its own fugitivity..."
Related:
“Conversation: Black Imaginaries.” Critical Productive Journal, Issue No. 3 (Summer 2026)
“Conversation: Black Imaginaries.” Critical Productive Journal, Issue No. 3 (Summer 2026)
Minor Feelings, group exhibition, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2027-29)
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