From the thrill of receiving their exhibition monograph to unexpected encounters with Octavia E. Butler, American Artist shares with Elephant the photographs that capture the evolution of Shaper of God.
January 6, 2025
A dummy copy of the monograph for my exhibition Shaper of God arrived via FedEx. What would be the first of many rounds of proofs sent by the printing company — the third and final company we contracted after the first two bankrupted and ghosted us respectively — gave me a glimmer of excitement. The blue book cloth I selected reminded me of the cover material of Virgil Abloh’s Figures of Speech.
January 24, 2025
The night of the opening reception at Pioneer Works, people ventured from all five boroughs of New York to the depths of Red Hook to attend Shaper of God. As I double-fisted water bottles, both still and sparkling, while feeling overstimulated and overheated, I exclaimed to a close friend, “There isn’t a single hater within a five-mile radius of here!”
February 11, 2025
A small package fell out of the back of a box truck bumping along Pioneer Street in Brooklyn. The package contained several stickers with a portrait of Octavia E. Butler as a high school freshman in 1962. I was never able to secure the rights to use this image on the cover of the book, so it felt serendipitous to inherit this errant package.
March 5, 2025
T-shirts for Shaper of God arrived at Pioneer Works. The imagery contains logos found in the scans across Butler’s 386 boxes she left to The Huntington upon her passing in 2006. As my friends purchased the shirt, they lamented that they’ve joined my cult.
March 14, 2025
I entered conversation with artists Martine Syms and Zainab Aliyu. Martine and I grew up just a few streets away from one another in the idyllic town of Altadena, California, a place that only entered public consciousness in light of the Eaton Fire. The homes that Martine and I grew up in burned down as the exhibition was being installed in early January.
March 23, 2025
A sound activation was performed by SCRAAATCH in the reading room of the exhibition. The images of fire, political zealotism and interplanetary mourning sparked behind them on a large LED wall. The dystopian speculations made by Butler in her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower were given a new shape by the whizzing drones of E. and Chuki.
American Artist: Shaper of God continues at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, until April 13, 2025.
