Museum of the African Diaspora presents David Huffman: Terra Incognita in the first museum show surveying the artist’s Traumanaut series. Emerging from Huffman’s lifelong interest in science fiction, formalist abstraction, and social justice movements, the “Traumanauts” are futuristic beings that travel the galaxy in constant search for home.

This exhibition showcases the extensive narrative that Huffman has been designing since the early 1990s across a range of media including large-scale canvas, works on paper, ceramics, video, and printmaking. This work explores an Afrofuturistic landscape disrupting the canon of historical narrative painting with otherworldly horizons. Combining his notable abstract, gestural style with a decidedly figurative focus, these works present an imagined and safe interstitial space that plays between these aesthetics. With influences from cartoons, the Black Power movement,and poetics of basketball, Huffman brings us into his celestial world.

David Huffman (American b. Berkeley, CA 1963, lives Oakland) studied at the New York Studio School, New York, NY and the California College of the Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. He received his MFA at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 1999. Huffman has had solo shows at venues including, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2018); Worlds in Collision, Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Culver City, CA (2016). Recent group exhibitions include To the Hoop, Basketball and Contemporary Art, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, NC (upcoming); Ordinary Objects / Wild Things, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2019); and Sidelined, Curated by Samuel Levi Jones, Galerie Lelong & Co, New York, NY (2018).

David Huffman: Terra Incognita is curated by Emily Kuhlmann, Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs and Elena Gross, Exhibitions Associate.

Museum of the African Diaspora
685 Mission St (at 3rd)
San Francisco, CA 94105

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