For over three decades, the works of multidisciplinary artist J. Yolande Daniels have explored the fraught relationship between race, power, and time, as well as how these concepts shape the built environment. Infusing her projects with sociological and architectural research, Daniels reveals the supremacist and racialized lenses that shape Western customs, laws, theories, and spatial artifacts, such as institutions, cities, maps, and dictionaries. In her first solo exhibition, J. Yolande Daniels: To A Future Space-Time, Daniels reappropriates several of these cultural tools—the timeline, atlas, and glossary—to make clear the defiant and future-oriented nature of African American community building in Los Angeles, whose history has largely been erased.
To A Future Space-Time is an ode to the origins of Black autonomy and positions the cultivation of Black space as a strategy that has always existed alongside, beneath, and beyond racist customs and laws. The exhibition guides visitors through a fluid mapping of the ways Black people have created their own space-time coordinates, their own measures of distance, and their own cartographic possibilities, without negotiating with the colonizer—without his customs or clock.
J. Yolande Daniels: To A Future Space-Time is curated by Zion Estrada, interdisciplinary artist-researcher and founder of Black Discourse, and is co-presented by CAAM and A+P as part of CAAM at A+P, a five-year collaboration.
