David Huffman | Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco

"Museum of the African Diaspora is pleased to present 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: Terra Incognita is co-curated by Elena Gross, Director of Exhibitions & Curatorial Affairs, Museum of the African Diaspora and independent curator Emily Kuhlmann.

This exhibition was originally set to open in 2020 and was rescheduled for public safety."