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An Exquisite Texture of Light: Ajamu X In Conversation with Rainbow Serpent
An Exquisite Texture of Light: Ajamu X In Conversation with Rainbow Serpent
5pm Wednesday April 2, 2025 @ ALMA | LEWIS
Ajamu X | Rainbow Serpent
FREE and Open to the Public
Rainbow Serpent, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit organization co-founded by Marques Redd and Mikael Owunna, welcomes their first international artist-in-residence, Ajamu X, to Pittsburgh from April 2-7, 2025. Ajamu X is an internationally renowned fine art photographic artist based in London whose aesthetics celebrate Black queer bodies. He has received an honorary fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society, and his work sits within many private and public collections, including The Rose Art Museum, Gallery of Modern Art, Autograph, Tate Britain, Arts Council of England, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Ajamu will bring his celebrated photography series FIERCE to Pittsburgh during his residency, capturing striking black-and-white portraits of Black LGBTQ Pittsburghers.
The residency will commence with a public artist talk entitled An Exquisite Texture of Light: Ajamu X In Conversation with Rainbow Serpent, presented at ALMA | LEWIS, a contemporary art incubator dedicated to supporting artists of color in Pittsburgh and beyond. Scheduled for April 2, 2025, at 5 PM, this discussion will provide an in-depth exploration of Ajamu X’s decades-long career documenting and celebrating Black queer communities around the world.
“Rainbow Serpent is honored to bring Ajamu to Pittsburgh,” said Redd. “Having had the privilege of sharing Rainbow Serpent’s mission and artistry across the globe, we can now offer Pittsburgh a unique opportunity to engage with the work of an international leader in contemporary art during Ajamu’s residency. We are thrilled for the City to experience Ajamu’s brilliance and his depths of scholarship, as he builds a visual archive of Pittsburgh’s Black LGBTQ community at this important historical moment.”
About Rainbow Serpent
Rainbow Serpent is a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing Black LGBTQ culture through emerging technologies, innovative healing protocols, African cosmologies, and multimedia art. Co-founded by artists Marques Redd and Mikael Owunna, the organization’s work has been experienced by audiences across the world and includes live performance, film, extended reality, music production, public artwork, curation, sculpture, and installation. Notable large-scale public art installations in Pittsburgh include The Three Sisters, an architectural light design on Pittsburgh’s Sister Bridges, and Playing the Cosmic Strings, a mural commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership.
Website: www.therainbowserpent.org
About Ajamu X
Ajamu X is an acclaimed fine art studio based / darkroom led photographic artist and archive curator. His work, theoretical provocations, aesthetics unapologetically celebrate Black queer bodies. His black and white images also pose the imagination, fiction, and play in opposition to constant framing of Black queer bodies and nuanced lived experiences from within a sociological framework.
Website: www.ajamu-studio.com