Inside the fantastical world of Afrofuturism, from P-Funk’s Mothership to ‘Black Panther’

In 1976, a sparkling silver spaceship landed on a stage in Houston to the sound of George Clinton and his musical ensemble Parliament-Funkadelic’s Mothership Connection. Since then, the mothership has become one the most iconic stage props in African American musical history—and a monument to Black culture so powerful that a replica of it was acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2011.

This year, another replica has landed in the Oakland Museum of California—and its significance is equally momentous.

Named after the spaceship, Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism is a new exhibition organized by OMCA curator Rhonda Pagnozzi and consulting curator Essence Harden, who pulled together an array of works by more than 50 Black artists, historians, and musicians. Their work examines Afrofuturism and Black culture.

While celebrating some of the Afrofuturism movement’s pioneers, including author Octavia E. Butler and avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra, the exhibit also pays homage to contemporary creatives like Los Angeles filmmaker Kahlil Joseph. In the process, it paints Afrofuturism as a strategy for Black community building, in which every Black voice, from Black-owned businesses to the Black Twitter community, is given a place to thrive. The exhibition comes a year after a summer of racial reckoning in the U.S., and offers a new way of framing a world that has long been seen through a white lens.

The idea behind Mothership was born in 2019, but shelter-in-place measures in California delayed the exhibition by more than a year. That delay was punctuated by Black Lives Matter protests, a nationwide racial reckoning, and a pandemic that brought social and racial injustices to the forefront of public health. “The thing with racial injustice and anti-Blackness is that it’s happened before this time and it’s likely going to happen after this time,” Harden says. “What Afrofuturism is attempting is to collapse time so that the past and the future are very much about the present.”

Together with Caine’s mural, the music also kicks off the exhibition on a joyful note. “Institutions that are inherently built on white supremacy will often start a story about Black culture with suffering and slavery, and that is a horrible, incorrect way to talk about diaspora because it doesn’t start there,” Pagnozzi explains. Instead, the experience starts with the art mural and soundscape, both of which are inspired by American science fiction author Octavia E. Butler— a central figure in the show.

A multisensory ode to Black voices, the show speaks to the breadth of Afrofuturism’s applications. “Afrofuturism is bombastic, loud, playful, and there’s a real emphasis upon Black freedom and liberation,” Harden explains. But ultimately, the movement provides a “visual landscape” for people to imagine themselves in. “To some degree, I can think of my grandmother as an Afrofuturist, a person who moved throughout the U.S. and decided to ground herself in Berkeley,” Harden adds. “I hope that we could think of cityscapes as once-chocolate cities that pioneered Afrofuturism—spaces that Black people believed in and made a life in.”

Mothership is on view until February 27, 2022. For tickets, more information, and details about the museum’s COVID-19 safety precautions, go to museumca.org.