The Kitchen is distributing Black data

The Kitchen is organizing the first exhibition dedicated to Black contributions to new media and digital art practices. Presented under the title Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art, the show will be on view at two institutions: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 2024 and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2025. The exhibition is organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator at The Kitchen, and Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant.

Inspired by André L. Brock's pioneering text Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020), the multi-site exhibition focuses on exploring the interplay of Black cultural production and the legacy of computation in manifesting human engagement with machines and as sources of artistic inspiration. The show is divided into two segments which will present the historical and contemporary aspects of Black involvement in the development of novel approaches to digital media.

The archival component has been organized in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where the history of data visualization before and after the advent of computers is the focal point of the exhibition. It follows a trajectory from W.E.B. Du Bois' twentieth-century hand-drawn graphs and charts which depict African-American contributions to American culture, to the role of Black programmers such as Evelyn Boyd Granville, Dorothy Vaughan, Tom Lloyd and Clarence “Skip” Ellis in advancing the fields of computing, mathematics and engineering.

By highlighting the indelible impact that these practitioners have had on establishing new sightlines for Black participation in visual culture, Code Switch uncovers the variegated spectrum of networked life that predates the internet and extends far into the future. The archival show at the Schomburg Center opens on October 16 and will be on view until December 19, 2024. The contemporary group show at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit will open on April 25, 2025. More information about this and other events organized by The Kitchen can be found on their site.