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Indepth Arts News:
"Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968"
2009-04-24 until 2009-08-02
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA,
USA United States of America
Jazz pioneer, bandleader, mystic, philosopher, and consummate Afro-Futurist,
Sun Ra, (born Herman Poole Blount 1914, Birmingham, Alabama, died 1993)
and his personal mythology have grown increasingly relevant to a broad range
of artists and communities. “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn
& Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968” presents a collection of
paintings, drawings, prints, manuscripts, ephemera, and video produced by and
about Ra and his associates--much of it previously unseen. This exhibition, on
view at the Institute of Contemporary Art April 24-August 2, 2009 in the second
floor gallery, examines how Ra and his dynamic, continually-evolving
ensemble, the Philadelphia-based Arkestra, crafted both their otherworldly
image and fiercely independent approach to self-production.
Highlights of the exhibition include original drawings for their 1960’s albums
Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow and Other Planes of There, and five newly
discovered typed and annotated broadsheets. Until recently, only one such
broadsheet was known to exist - the one that Ra gave saxophonist John
Coltrane in 1956. The show will also include the unpublished manuscript, The
Magic Lie, a book of Ra’s poetry, which has become influential in the nascent
Black Islamic movement. In addition to these documents, the film Spaceways,
by Edward English, will be on view. The film documents Ra and his Arkestra
(a deliberate re-spelling of "orchestra"), in 1968, as they prepare to perform
at Carnegie Hall.
Early in his career, Sun Ra spent virtually all of his time and energy on
Chicago's south side, identifying with broader struggles for black power and
identity, and saw his music as a key element in that struggle. As well as Sun
Ra's connection to the incipient grass-roots Afro-Futurist movement in Chicago,
he also has a connection to Philadelphia. In 1968, Sun Ra brought the Arkestra
to Philadelphia, where his band mate Marshall Allen inherited a house on
Morton Street in Germantown. The house served as band headquarters until
Sun Ra's death in 1993. The Arkestra continues to perform under the
leadership of Marshall Allen, who still resides at the Germantown house.
Long admired among fans of progressive jazz, Ra and his personal mythology
have grown increasingly relevant and influential to a broad range of artists and
communities. His music touched on the entire history of jazz, but he was also a
pioneer of electronic and space music, and free improvisation.
Sun Ra developed a complicated persona of cosmic philosophies and lyrical
poetry that made him a pioneer of Afro-futurism (a term coined by cultural
critic Mark Dery in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future.")
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