Afro-Surrealism & Collage

Afro-Surrealism and Collage Workshop with Krista Franklin

What is Afro-Surrealism? How do we move through the world as free beings and produce really magnificent things for ourselves, for our society, for our culture?

Krista Franklin posed those questions to Teen Lab after we finished reading the Afro-Surrealist Manifesto by D. Scot Miller. Our following discussion hit on identity, change, intellectual games, and collage, and more.

Teen collages

My work emerges at the intersection of poetics, popular culture, and the dynamic histories of the African Diaspora. The Fantastic, the surreal, mythmaking, black portraiture, and the collective conscious are conceptual preoccupations of my work. The forms take shape in collage, hand papermaking, installation, poetry, letterpress, altered bookmaking and performance. I appropriate image and text as a political gesture that chisels away at the narratives historically inscribed on women and people of color, and forges imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions.

Krista opened the workshop by talking about her own artistic practice in relation to the Afro-Surrealist Manifesto.

“I’ve used this text as the intellectual and conceptual foundation for making work in the past," she explained.

"D. Scot Miller," she said, "is playing an intellectual game with us. He’s using history, literature, and music to tell us what it’s like to be a person of color in this world and how we can push ourselves into intellectual and physical places of freedom." Musicians, artists, poets, fashion designers- there are so many names referenced in here of people who have shown us the possibilities of our freedom- what our freedom might look like."