Kimberly Rose Drew on the Limits of Utopia

Especially with augmented reality and virtual reality, I think the museum experience is going to become more immersive. It’s really on the rise if you think about programs like The Interactive Pen at the Cooper Hewitt, Martine Syms’s recent show at The MoMA, or about Digital Storytelling at the Smithsonian for African American History and Culture in D.C.

I don’t think about art in that way, because in my mind utopia is something that can be wed to a particular window of time. So, it’s like, “This is ultimate pleasure, this is freedom, this is the ecstasy that we seek,” and that kind of limits it. For me, I’m excited by the number of voices that are emerging in the moment, and the ways in which we all feel empowered by the generation ahead of us to actively participate—the sky's the limit and perhaps utopia limits that.

I’m very centralized in my own studies and in my work on black cultural production, but I do often encourage people—especially when I do campus visits—to be like, “If there’s something that you love, do that shit! Don’t ask for permission.” I know what worked for me, but I would never dare to say, “This is the magical solution to success,” or, “This is the magical path towards utopia.”

I like that, because I think if there’s something I hope for in the future for black artists, and for a black art “discourse,” it’s that people continue to think about it as an instance of futurity and expansiveness. That there is always more. I always encourage others to have an imagination about the future possibilities of black cultural production.

I’m really invested in talking to elders in the art world. Especially post-election—and since I’m also working on my first book—I’ve been thinking about strategies for survival through black cultural production. Talking to people who have done more with less than I’ve had has been a key focus of my practice, and it’s something I’ve done totally offline. Just sitting with them and trying to dream big dreams and hearing firsthand from someone who has exceeded their ancestor’s wildest dreams has been really important for me.

I want more imagination about the possibilities of black cultural production. That’s kind of my underbelly hope.

Yeah—my little, quiet, soft goals. I feel really lucky to have so many artists as friends. I was raised with a family of artists as well, so understanding the life that goes into a work, its social history, is 10 million times more interesting to me than what actually hangs on the wall. That is perhaps what makes my work interesting to other people, because it’s like, I’ll be partying with these people because they’re my actual friends, and then I’ll also go to their openings because they’re dope people. It’s not like, “Oh, this person has commercial success so I’m going to support them.” Life is too short for that shit.

Yeah, so, I’m working on it with Jenna Wortham. She slid into my DMs and changed my life. Now we’re working on this book project, and it’s going to be like a coffee table book. The idea is to create something like an anthology. One of our biggest inspirations is Toni Morrison—in the 70s she did this book called The Black Book where she sat with people and they aimed to record that particular moment.

Yeah! What we’re hoping to do is create a book like that for our generation that is something that can support the way and the pace in which people are producing—online especially. Because you have these incredible moments that happen, like everything from #BlackoutBlackFriday to Colin Kaepernick. But there’s no proper spot to place it against other things and to think about these iconic image-moments that happen online together. And also just in perpetuity, because the Library of Congress isn’t working fast enough to preserve all of our tweets and snaps. We’re in this really weird time in terms of production online and so we’re hoping to bring some kind of tentpole figures together to build a book that can in some way represent it.

It’s really exciting. It’s hilarious because you didn’t know my book was called Black Futures but you wanted to talk about futurity! It’s perfect.