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Join us at Artpace this June for the opening of Futures Past: Reflections for Juneteenth, a powerful group exhibition honoring Black emancipation and resilience. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, June 13, from 6 to 8pm in the Hudson Showroom.
Featuring works by Robert Hodge, Isaac Julien, Cauleen Smith, and Wangechi Mutu, the exhibition brings together a diverse range of practices that engage with themes of historical memory, speculative futures, and the ongoing pursuit of liberation.
Houston-based artist Robert Hodge contributes layered mixed-media assemblages constructed from salvaged materials. His work foregrounds the everyday as a site of cultural memory, paying homage to African American figures and traditions while recontextualizing urban ephemera into poetic, politically resonant forms.
British filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien presents a multi-channel video work that explores the entangled histories of diaspora, desire, and displacement. Drawing from archival footage, literature, and constructed narratives, Julien’s cinematic language invites a meditative engagement with the visual and emotional textures of Black identity across time and geography.
Los Angeles-based Cauleen Smith introduces film and installation pieces that combine Afrofuturist aesthetics with historical inquiry. Her work offers speculative spaces grounded in radical imagination, where collective memory, protest, and healing converge. Smith’s practice challenges viewers to envision liberatory futures anchored in the power of community and ritual.
Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu contributes sculptural and collage-based works that investigate the construction of the body and self within postcolonial and feminist frameworks. Merging organic and fantastical elements, Mutu’s figures embody transformation, resilience, and otherworldly agency, disrupting normative representations and asserting new mythologies.
Together, these artists offer a compelling meditation on Juneteenth—not as an endpoint, but as a portal. In the Hudson Showroom at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, Futures Past invites audiences to consider freedom as a process, shaped by remembrance, resistance, and the radical potential of imagining otherwise.
Free and open to the public
Friday, June 13, 2025
Doors open at 6PM (Opening Remarks start at 6:30 PM)