Ajmal ‘Mas Man’ Millar: COCKPIT
@ FLXST Contemporary
2251 S Michigan Ave, Suite 220, Chicago, IL 60616
Opening Friday, June 30th, at 5PM
On view through Wednesday, December 31st
🎉 We’re halfway through the year, and we are ready for an amazing art show and a celebration!
💯 We are ecstatic to announce Chicago-based Ajmal ‘Mas Man’ Millar’s solo show debut COCKPIT at FLXST Co. Coinciding with Pride and the artist’s birthday month, Millar debuts new sculptural assemblages inspired by the queer kink and BDSM communities of color and the histories of Black and Brown diasporas as they intersect with craft, design, and folk-art techniques. Millar’s assemblage art is unabashedly sex-positive and provokes viewers to re-consider the “cockring” as a symbol of resistance and joy within Black and Brown queer communities. Millar surfaces the cockring out of the private domain into the public realm as an elevated object used during sex and as an object that facilitates critical thought and critique.
📌 The opening reception is FRI, June 30. Gallery doors open at 5pm. Come as you are. The gallery is a safe and non-judgmental space for all.
🔥 The prescient poem “American Wedding,” written by Black gay poet Essex Hemphill in 1992 inspires Millar’s show—the issues addressed by Hemphill in the poem continue to resonate 31 years later. The first two sentences of the poem convey then conceptual power of Millar’s show.
In america,
I place my ring
on your cock
where it belongs.
No horsemen
bearing terror,
no soldiers of doom
will swoop in
and sweep us apart.
(excerpt from “American Wedding” by Essex Hemphill
🙏🏽 Ajmal ‘MAS MAN’ Millar was born on June 30, 1986, in Brooklyn, NY. He is a self-taught contemporary visual artist and mas man (carnival costume designer). His work includes mixed–media sculptural works that combine collage, painting, re-purposed material, scrap metal, performance, and photography interrogating notions of cultural heritage, sexual and gender identity, and ritual practices as a first-generation African American black queer man born to Trinidadian immigrants.
He earned an undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in 2008 and earned an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Currently, he lives and works in Chicago.
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Tags: Ajmal ‘Mas Man’ Millar: COCKPIT, Ajmal “MAS MAN” Millar, Chicago, COCKPIT, FLXST Contemporary, Near South Side
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