A Future Unlike Us in Retrospect

By Alexandria Davis

Anthems of influence branching across ancestral lines spin the tale of the black body's chance to dance our way out of constriction. A people united in groove embark on a transcendental journey to an Ancient Future in which the superficial values of a post-Jim Crow caste and misrepresentation are no longer what defines our progress and potential. In this era, perspective is the Future, and the past is a chrysalis of matter more significant than the condition of a sacred identity created in mixed media, movement, sound, and solidarity. 

First debuted in 2023 at the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, Florida, Jamea Richmond Edwards's exhibit Ancient Future is a unique and deeply personal capsule assembled in the company of alternative narratives and interpersonal dialogue. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Jamea Richmond-Edwards is a spatial compositor who encapsulates the subjects of her memory and meditation into painted monuments of alchemy. Although I was not privileged to view the work in person, Richmond-Edwards generously shares pieces of Ancient Future and the pilgrimage that led to the work's inception in a series of articles, interviews, social media posts, and on her website. On Instagram, she invites followers and scrollers fortunate enough to encounter her profile via the algorithm to peek behind the canvas into her creative process and deeply personal insights related to the work's themes and intention.

https://www.mocanomi.org/posts/jamea-richmond-edwards-ancient-future

A testament to Retro-Surrealism, Ancient Future juxtaposes collages of Baroque quality and architectural shapes on vibrantly colored canvases adorned in "acrylic, gold leaf, oil pastel, glitter, and mixed media" (@JameaRichmondEdwards, 2023). Part gallery exhibit and part digital media presentation, Richmond-Edwards's Ancient Future is akin to witnessing the manifestation of a past life regression shaped by history, myth, and faith in an abundant reality that transcends the paradigms of colonialist reconstruction. Here, the black body's expression of belonging is no longer realized through values and qualifications that are non-native to black identity. Ancient Future is a work of "blood memory" and nuanced liberation. During an interview with Daricia DeMarr, author and editor at Sugarcane magazine, Richmond-Edwards candidly shares her visceral revolution pre- and post-creative process, recounting how a "billion-year-old ancestral consciousness" led her to confront her connection to the "dragons" of her environment and lucid memory of Detroit's architecture and robust black history (DeMarr, 2023). 

The work evolves through a compilation of digital and fabricated materials that reposition negritude on canvas. Negritude, a philosophical concept that celebrates the respectability of Black art and multicultural identity, is transformed by Richmond-Edwards into a post-modern interplay of Afrofuturism and milieux de mémoire. Each piece is a visual broadcast urging its viewers to wake up and re-envision their role in the collective function of the same "Us" referenced in Kendrick Lamar's 2025 Grammy award-winning song, "They Not Like Us." For Richmond-Edwards, Ancient Future is a testament to the historical and cultural significance of the Black aesthetic. A monument of limitless boundaries, the work is an invitation to "level up…a method of escape from the linear thought paradigm I was conditioned in during this era" (@JameaRichmondEdwards, 2023).

https://www.jamearichmondedwardsstudios.com/gallery

While examining the relationship and spatial juxtaposition of black authenticity in contemporary art practice and performance, I begin to question what remains sacred after the dehumanization of a timeless drifter realized at the intersection of African, American, Indigenous, and Colored identity. Is implicit bias for the Black Aesthetic what separates us from them? Recalling conversations shared over coffee and contemplation with artists, colleagues, and international community members, I began to unearth my answers to these questions through the personal and collective practice of community-accountable methodology and self-reflection. Jamea Richmond-Edwards and Kendrick Lamar, both influential figures in Black art and culture, encourage their viewers to reflect on the theories that inform our understanding of belonging within Black life. Both artists use a relational aesthetic, drawing from commentary and autobiography. The diversity in mediums used in the creation and socialization of Ancient Future and They Not Like Us draws from the entanglements of memory and intracultural viewpoints concerning an identified consciousness labeled "us" for Kendrick Lamar and "you" for Jamea Richmond-Edwards. The film "Ancient Future" and the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Performance of "They Not Like Us" ask the audience and commentator to investigate their relationship to the multifaceted socialization of authentic black familiarity. To quote interdisciplinary scholar and Michigan State University Professor LeConté Dill, DrPH, during a chat over coffee, Jamea Richmond-Edwards's 2023 film, Ancient Future, is like watching "a Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade on the big screen." It is a Historically Black College and University(HBCU) Marching Band Halftime challenge to ponder, "If space is the place, what do we have here?" (@lordefredd33, 2023). The film opens with a warped voice confronting the viewer's perception of black reality. The narrator directly addresses the viewer's figurative existence, proclaiming, "You do not exist in this society; if you did, your people would not be seeking equal rights…black people are myths" (@lordefredd33, @JameaRichmondEdwards, 2023).

During the film, Richmond-Edwards and the ensemble fiercely prance across space and time to crashing cymbals, a grooving guitar, a trap drum set, and lyrics by a prophet of funk, calling us to feel and respond to our amplifying collective rhythm within the interactive parable of trial and triumph that is the film's abstract narrative. Dr. Dill and I continue to vibe throughout our conversation about the film, both of us reminiscing about our past experiences with Memorial Day parades across the United States. Similar to the pre- or post-game HBCU marching band processional during a homecoming weekend or classic event. The parade is a performance ritual of black excellence and legacy. "At least that is what I teach my students in my 'Pedagogies of Protest' class" (Dill, 2025). Dill, an associate professor in the African American and African Studies department at Michigan State University, shares her perceptions of the socio-political impact of these multicolored celebrations of life, legacy, resilience, and cultural veneration. Parades like the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Parade in South Central Los Angeles. "Black bodies traveling east to west along MLK Boulevard in observance of civil rights iconography and emancipation." Similar to Mardi Gras's Zulu Parade, Oakland's Black Joy Parade, Carnival and Carnivale, J'ouvert across the Caribbean, Junkanoo in the Bahamas, Crop Over Festival in Barbados, Brazil" (Dill, 2025), to Dill, growing up traipsing across homeplaces that map the agency of so many Black people across the Diaspora was always a treat.

https://www.wuft.org/longform/2022-03-23/how-a-black-marching-band-style-was-erased-from-gainesvilles-fields-and-why-it-matters-decades-later

Dill recalls being about nine years old during a South Central Los Angeles parade when the "big kids" from the Lula Washington Contemporary Dance Theater passed before her on MLK Boulevard, dancing the Cabbage Patch. The earliest articulations of the social dance had debuted just a few months earlier on South Central playgrounds and street corners before traveling across Black spaces, backyards, and living rooms onto dance floors and music video shoots set up to capture the soon-to-be national dance craze. It was during parades like these that Dill realized the transformative power they held for little Black girls like us and our Black families. Parades are not just a celebration but a powerful performance ritual that can interrupt gang violence, if only for a few hours. They are sites of black excellence and collective pride. Parades are a soul-walk for a resilient identity through chartered space where the past and the Future intersect. A testament to the power of community building, parades foster a sense of belonging and connection to a larger whole. At the parade, Dill first witnessed the synchronization of drill teams and marching bands performing rituals of ancient formations camouflaged in contemporary regalia. Here, floats honoring local celebrities and dignitaries mingle with lowriders hitting hydraulics amidst prancing horses, cowgirls, and cowboys, all stepping across decades of creation and reinvention.

A legacy, in retrospect, as told by a diverse group of melanated people, forms a unique yet relatable way of life meant for more than a bystander's entertainment. For people like LeConté Dill, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Kendrick Lamar, and Alexandria Davis, black life manifests as a collective experience. Our DNA was forged through the Middle Passage, uniting us in a timeless celebration of cultural solidarity that transcends the exploitation of the Black aesthetic for capitalist gain. From gospel to hip-hop, graffiti to contemporary art, our memories retell the stories of lived experiences.  

As a southern belle gone rogue, rapt in somatic protest for self-reappropriation, the more I research and settle into the intention and socialization of Ancient Future and "They Not Like Us," the more I dream, empathize with, and celebrate the myths of our ancient Black American history. I find Jamea Richmond-Edwards's layering of fabric, motion, and self-reflection both visually striking and psychosomatically comforting. The exhibition and film encourage me to reimagine the conditions of my inclusion. How do we know that we are real? Are black people just myths formed outside of the paradigms of the visual and performance art techniques that guarantee, inform, and isolate us among those whose lives are not impacted by the United States of America's contribution to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow Reconstruction, Civil Rights, and the global exploitation of our cultures likeness in film, minstrelsy, and visual arts as eternal sinners impacted by the recessive traits of our extraction from Diaspora that made us "naughty by nature..." 

Reflecting on a candid conversation about Black arts and heritage while traveling in the United Kingdom further illuminates my pathway to juxtaposing the concepts and themes within Ancient Future and "They Not Like Us." One of my most vivid examples involves a dialogue at the 2023 Let's Dance International Frontiers conference in Leicester, UK, with my dear friend Thomas Talawa Prestø, who eloquently explained that, for me, being Black is a way of life I chose, while for our mutual Senegalese friend across the table, being Black was something done to him. It represents "the colonialists' attempt to sanitize a culture of its identity and history." During that discussion, I was confronted by the intracultural disdain for my approach to Black pride and improvisation within a global conversation surrounding our cultural appropriation and capitalistic exploitation of the "African Diaspora." The international critique of Blackness in conversations about camouflage and Pan-Africanism serves as a living archive charting the reasons why not all skin folk want to be kin folk, despite many black people's pride and connection to  Reverend Jesse Jackson's 20th-century declaration stating that our existence as a new people had evolved past African and Colonial-centered identity into Black. 

For me, being Black is a protest for intercultural liberty and justice despite the distortion of gestures and themes attributed to the cyclical socializations of our likeness as an unwanted way of life, in which caste, color, and respectability are tethered into a colorful caricature of deferred dreams and risky behavior. To all my melanated people existing in a post-colonial world, let us discuss how we perceive the cultures and histories we have lost to those we have redefined through artificial intelligence, transgenerational bias, and memory. To quote poet Arsimmer McCoy, during a conversation about the effects of Nature on Black life and creative process, "As Black people evolving post-middle passage, we are walking artificial intelligence." Even if we trace our DNA back to a specific group of people residing in the motherland, knowing our origins does not negate the conditions that influence our evolution as a people connected and impacted by the conditions of Black life in the United States. Black trauma is not all that we are; however, it is the perpetuation of implicit bias for our resilience to the conditions of our becoming that further define us in relationship to them.

Citations

Armstrong, A. (2023, December 14). Jamea Richmond-Edwards is conjuring her own the Afrofuturist mythos. Artnet News. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/jamea-richmond-edwards-ancient-future-moca-north-miami-2408550

Aton, F. (2023, December 4). Jamea Richmond-Edwards reimagines her trauma as a vibrant future in a MOCA North Miami show. ARTnews.com. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/jamea-richmond-edwards-moca-north-miami-1234688315/ 

Black nature conversations – NWD projects. (2023). https://www.nwdprojects.org/black-nature-conversations/ 

Brommel, J. (2020, February). Jamea Richmond-Edwardss. Wassaic Project. https://www.wassaicproject.org/artists/jamea-richmond-edwards 

Davis, A., & Prestø, T. T. (2023). Let's Dance International Frontiers. personal. 

Davis, A., & Dill, L. J. (2025). Community Engaged Research Fellowship and Dialogues on Ancient Future. Personal. 

DeMarr, D. (2023, December 11). Jamea richmond-edwards' ancienFuturere: Mythology and memory adorn her work - sugarcane magazine TM: Black Art Magazine. Sugarcane Magazine TM| Black Art Magazine. https://sugarcanemag.com/2023/12/jamea-richmond-edwards-ancient-futures-mythology-and-memory-adorn-her-work/ 

Funkadelic. (1978.). One nation under a groove [MP3]. George Clinton. 

Jamea Richmond-Edwards: AncienFuturere. Home - Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. (n.d.). https://www.mocanomi.org/posts/jamea-richmond-edwards-ancient-future 

Naughty By Nature. (1993). Hip hop hooray [MP3]. Tommy Boy Music. 

Richmond-Edwards, J. (2023a). Jamea Richmond-Edwards on Instagram. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/jamearichmondedwards/?hl=en 

Summer of Soul. (2021). Retrieved from https://www.searchlightpictures.com/summerofsoul/.