Blending digital and manual making processes, robotic elements, and a series of water pumps, the massive, improvised fountain at the center of Lewis Colburn’s A Fountain for a Dark Future alludes to disruptive events on the human horizon such as sea level rise, automation, and the rise of authoritarianism.

A new immersive installation that underscores the reality that life-sustaining natural resources will become scarce across the globe, as humans both drive, and are impacted by, climate change, droughts, population growth, development and pollution. Here in South Florida, home to one of the most productive purifying aquifer systems in the world, the work weighs the value of gold and extractive capitalism against clean water and fertile soil.

During her residency at Locust Projects, Johnson will transform the Mobile Studio into a physical space to inform, heal, and offer counter-narratives that commemorate Black women and girls and celebrates their role in the community; a place where they can feel seen, apart from the world that continues to silence them and deem them invisible. In the words of poet Nayyirah Waheed, “All the women in me are tired”. An offering to Black women, Remnants responds to this collective experience by providing a place for all of these women in us to rest, normalize vulnerability, and dismantle the myth of the Black Superwoman while also reconnecting with and honoring our mothers, our mothers’ mothers and their mamas too.

Locust Projects supports the business of being an artist through LegalARTLink, a program offering pro bono legal services, referrals, and professional development workshops for artists based in Miami. 

If you have questions about the program or need help with a new legal issue, schedule an appointment here to chat with Allyn Ginns Ayers, LegalARTLink Director, practicing attorney, and dancer. 

Loni Johnson's residency at Locust Projects transforms the Mobile Studio into a physical space to inform, heal, and offer counter-narratives that commemorate Black women and girls and celebrates their role in the community. As part of her current exhibition, Johnson invites you to bring meaningful objects--such as photographs, memorabilia, crystals, jewelry, and more--and build small altars as offerings to your ancestors. Participants will be guided to contemplate how we claim, navigate, and hold space; how ancestral and historical memory informs where, when, and how we occupy spaces; and how we carry and honor our ancestors in the spaces we move through. The altars will be unified into a larger piece and installed as a collaborative work.

Join Locust Projects and Oolite Arts virtually for a conversation with Dr. Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator for Special Projects in Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, streamed on Facebook Live.

Dr. Lynne Cooke is Senior Curator for Special Projects in Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. From 2012-2014 she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art.

Loni Johnson's residency at Locust Projects transforms the Mobile Studio into a physical space to inform, heal, and offer counter-narratives that commemorate Black women and girls and celebrates their role in the community. As part of her current exhibition, Johnson invites you to bring meaningful objects--such as photographs, memorabilia, crystals, jewelry, and more--and build small altars as offerings to your ancestors. Participants will be guided to contemplate how we claim, navigate, and hold space; how ancestral and historical memory informs where, when, and how we occupy spaces; and how we carry and honor our ancestors in the spaces we move through. The altars will be unified into a larger piece and installed as a collaborative work.

Join us on Thu, Oct 28 at 7pm for a Virtual Roundtable with Lewis Colburn and Leah Sandler. The conversation will be gently guided and grounded in our local context by Miami-based artist misael soto.  

Lewis Colburn's A Fountain for a Dark Future is a larger than life recreation of Umberto Boccioni’s iconic sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). Using it as a point of departure, this roundtable will explore Italian Futurism, imagined utopias, disruptive events, automation, authoritarianism, sea level rise, Silicon Valley, speculative fiction, Sci-Fi, and more. By using the sculptural forms of the past to interrogate the conditions of the present, we may find our way toward possible futures. 

Leah Sandler's Center For Post-Capitalist History is a fictitious museum existing through para-fictional interventions that flesh out imagined post-capitalist institutions, rituals, histories, manifestos, and landscapes. misael soto's Department of Reflection is a post-governmental agency in collaboration with the City of Miami Beach that serves as a foil (or reflection) of municipal entities while producing creative moments of exchange with residents. Lewis Colburn's A Fountain for a Dark Future is on view now in the Project Room at Locust Projects.