Shaper of God, an exhibition by American Artist at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works art centre (until 13 April), is the culmination of a four-year-long project, but in many ways it is decades in the making. The works in it are inspired by the prescient writing of the speculative fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), and the biographical and personal details she shares with Artist (who legally changed their name in 2013). A particular touchstone is the 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, which presented a stark image of American society in the 2020s—when corporate greed, unchecked climate change and the sweeping acceptance of an authoritarian US president lead to the collapse of American society and the return of slavery.
“The Parable series, set in Los Angeles in 2024, suggests that building community is humanity’s best chance for survival,” Artist writes in the introduction to the monograph published by Pioneer Works in conjunction with the show. “It warns that when demagogues and oligarchs hold power and oppose everything you value, you’d better have an escape plan.” The protagonist of the series, a young Black woman named Lauren Oya Olamina, works to escape this terror by building a religion centred on launching humanity beyond this planet to find a new home among the stars.
American Artist, The Monophobic Response, 2024 (still) Courtesy American Artist and Pioneer Works
Last summer, as part of the PST Art festival in Los Angeles, Artist staged a performance in the desert imagining the early rocket tests by the community Olamina founded in the book, known as Earthseed. A video of this performance, The Monophobic Response, is on view at Pioneer Works, along with an installation that includes a functional replica of a rocket engine designed in 1936 by students at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab at the California Institute of Technology, a precursor of Pasadena’s famous Jet Propulsion Lab.
Another installation recreates the living room of Olamina’s childhood home, where her father preached and neighbourhood kids were taught, since leaving their walled community to attend school was too dangerous. This serves as a reading room where visitors can study books by and about Butler, as well as related topics, including science fiction and fact, Black culture and California history.
The reading room is flanked by a video wall projecting three works that draw on the Parable series, including a short presidential ad for a populist candidate in the novel, Christopher Donner, who promises to sell off and privatise the country’s space programme, and solve the homeless crisis by indenturing the unhoused as cheap labour. In Artist’s version, the candidate bears an uncanny resemblance to the rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West), who ran for president in 2020. In another video, the death of a female astronaut on Mars is reported in a fictional news segment, meant to evoke questions about the ethics and merits of space exploration, a timely topic when American billionaires are preoccupied by a costly corporate space race whose main goal seems to be personal glory.
“This whole series, it's not just as simple as being inspired by Butler's writing. It's really using it as a lens to think about and critique things that are going on in real life,” says the show’s curator, Vivian Chui
Installation view of American Artist: Shaper of God at Pioneer Works Dan Bradica Studio, courtesy Pioneer Works
"Butler’s work resonates today because it was never simply speculative, and never about fantastical escapism. It was grounded in her study of history and human behavior," says Zainab Aliyu, who edited the accompanying monograph.
"Butler wasn’t a prophet, but someone who analysed patterns of the past to envision possible futures. She described herself as a "histofuturist". Many of the themes Butler explored (such as climate crisis, right-wing extremism, migration, wealth inequality) remain urgent today."
A number of works draw on the similar backgrounds of Butler and Artist, who both grew up in Pasadena and neighbouring Altadena, attending the same high school decades apart (Artist’s aunts, in fact, were Butler’s classmates). “This connection inspired a desire to understand what it was about this locale that seemed to nourish important creative work by artists like Butler and myself,” Artist writes in the monograph.
To research this, Artist spent months looking through Butler’s archives, which were donated to the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena after her death in 2006. While Artist was not allowed to photocopy or scan any of the documents or journals, they could hand-copy them using pink-coloured paper provided by the library. These almost monastically recorded documents are on view in vitrines at Pioneer Works, providing insight into Butler’s personal history and the close attention she paid to the environment and social fabric around her. It also serves to record a history threatened by the recent Eaton fires, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, where a wave of middle-class Black families were able to buy homes during the Civil Rights Era.
Installation view of American Artist: Shaper of God at Pioneer Works Dan Bradica Studio, courtesy Pioneer Works
Digging even deeper into Butler’s biography, Artist has built a chicken coop as a stand-in for the one Butler’s grandmother had when the family first moved to California in the 1930s during the Great Migration, a period when Black Americans sought to escape the economic hardship and racial terrorism of the South by moving to other parts of the US. The chicken coop provided an independent income for Butler’s grandmother at a time when job prospects for Black women were slim.
“Though I could spend a lifetime unpacking the 9,062 objects Butler entrusted to The Huntington across 386 boxes, I have spent the last four years learning about Butler’s process, and through that, my own,” Artist writes. “I want to carry that forward, not just by telling ‘if-this-goes-on’ stories, but also by asking ‘what-if?’ Butler was steadfast in her commitment to questioning the reality many take for granted. She taught me that by studying history closely, we can accurately describe the challenges we will face in the future. And the truth must be told, no matter how many people are listening.”
- American Artist: Shaper of God, until 13 April, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn
