Studio Museum

Kambui Olujimi and Andre D. Wagner

Future Continuous

25 Mar - 26 Jul 2019

© Kambui Olujimi
And Sometimes Why (detail), 2019
Vinyl installation, dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist
KAMBUI OLUJIMI AND ANDRE D. WAGNER
Future Continuous
25 March - 26 July 2019

Future Continuous brings together multidisciplinary artist Kambui Olujimi and street photographer Andre D. Wagner in Harlem’s historic George Bruce Library. Working together for the first time, Olujimi and Wagner have created a new, collaborative installation as a part of the Studio Museum’s inHarlem initiative.

Olujimi presents drawings of his own dreams and those of his community collected over the past decade. Inspired by global traditions of dream analysis and interpretive dream books sold in bodegas in Harlem and the artist’s native Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Olujimi’s drawings unfold above the library’s first-floor bookshelves. Reference copies of Olujimi’s personal dream journal are available in zine form at the library’s front desk, inviting visitors to further explore the depths of a collective unconscious.

Against Olujimi’s dreamscape, Wagner presents a constellation of silver gelatin prints that celebrate the quotidian—the extraordinary in the everyday. Fleeting, public, yet intimate, Wagner’s photographs capture the vibrant streetscapes and residents of Harlem, Bushwick, and greater New York. Developed in the artist’s private darkroom, each image reveals a vignette of life in New York: implicit exchanges, summertime adolescence, and Halloween in Harlem.

Olujimi and Wagner’s dialogue illuminates the relationship between past, present, and future, mixing real with surreal to ask: “How did we get here—and where are we going?”

George Bruce Library is located at 518 W. 125th Street and is accessible by elevator for visitors who use wheelchairs and other forms of assistance for walking. For further questions about accessibility, contact Library Manager Junelle Carter-Bowman at 212.662.9727.

Future Continuous is organized by Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions, and Hanna Girma, Curatorial Fellow, and is an inHarlem project presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem in partnership with George Bruce Library, where it is on view through July 26, 2019.