Classic Other Worlds, an iteration of ongoing conversations between A.J. McClenon and Anna Martine Whitehead, is a series of calls and responses. Two or more things come into contact with one another, making their co-constitution ever more apparent, and producing some other meaning not inherent in those things’ isolation – gestalt. This practice – bricolage, defined by Anna Dezeuze as a “tension between constraints and possibilities” – grows out of a lineage of black making and critical fabulation. Newspaper clippings and magazines. Fishing nets and life preservers. These are the materials on offer as tools for other-world-making. As Erin Christovale writes, there is “a particular black impulse, which … is rooted in collage, assemblage, improvisation, and the slippages and the fluidity of making.” (Raengo and Mcleod Cramer 2021, 91-95) Working generously with the notion of found media layered to produce new and deeper meaning, McClenon and Whitehead source magazines, viral videos, training tapes, children’s toys, rehearsal footage, and other detritus. Through this material curation, both artists work toward a grand mash-up of new [old] theoretical frameworks. Together, their works gesture toward dreams of some other place – worlds under-water, through the looking-glass, or in the dirt; worlds where prison is a strange idea, and DJs are scientists.

This exhibition will open as a birthday party and close as a performance.

A.J. McClenon was born and raised in D.C. proper in a multigenerational home with grandparents from Trenton and Chester, South Carolina. A.J.holds a Master’s in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Bachelor of Arts with a minor in creative writing from the University of Maryland, College Park. A.J. has also studied at The New School. Currently, A.J. is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose practice moves through text, repurposed materials, moving and still images, performance, and sound.

Familial and collective grief, water, Blackness, geomorphology, and the global future drive A.J.’s work, which is also grounded in abolitionist thought. How do systems of carceral and psychic confinement shape lived experiences? How does understanding these systems more deeply reimagine ecological pathways toward liberation?

A.J. has shown work and performed at places like the MCA Chicago, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. A.J. is currently an Assistant Professor, Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and does teen programming at Columbus Park in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago.

Anna Martine Whitehead addresses performance and its remains from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires (Chicago or Zhigaagong). Their solo and collaborative work has been presented by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, REDCAT, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Museum of Modern Art, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Martine and her work have been recognized by Ruth Arts, United States Artists, the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, the Graham Foundation, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, MAP Fund, Dance/USA, 3Arts, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action and contributed chapters to a range of publications including In the Horizontal Plane: taisha paggett performance works (Soberscove, forthcoming); Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017); and Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (2016). Martine is the author of TREASURE| My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).