![Black Portraiture[s]](https://www.blackportraitures.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Black_Portraitures_Logo_full_color_light_type-2.svg){kind=logo}
What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965
Justin Randolph Thompson
You won’t be naming no building after me… to go down dilapidated’ Erykah Badu Justin Randolph Thompson is a new media artist and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Living between Italy and the US since 2001, Thompson is a co-founder and Director of Black History Month Florence. He has exhibited and lectured internationally and participated in numerous residencies in the US and in Europe in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Reina Sofia, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, The Mobile Museum of Art, the American Academy in Rome and more. Thompson’s work questions the implications of cultural relics and the mutability of their veneration within the context of displacement. Broadly collaborative and inherently interdisciplinary he relies upon the collective power of creative dialogue to provide platforms that envision communities as temporary monuments.
New York University Florence, Lecturer