Shawn Theodore

Shawn Theodore

(b. Stuttgart, Germany 1970)
Lives and works in Philadelphia, PA 

Not So Satisfactual (Future Antebellum Series) (1/5), 2017, photograph

Collection of Dr. Robert B. Feldman

Shawn Theodore’s work “merges real and hypothesized mythological black experiences set within contemporary, yet fading, Black environments.” Theodore creates multiple narratives in Not So Satisfactual (Future Antebellum Series) that conflates time and history, fiction and reality, voice and intervention.  The two youthful women, staged, conjure radical 1970s Black Panther activism and Black Feminism through poise, demeanor, fashion, and the gaze as if channeling the era of a young Angela Davis and the antiestablishment Pam Grier of Blaxploitation films.  The booted, confident duo sit before two mysterious figures suggesting servitude and hierarchy before yet another staged element of two more figures behind a screen.  Distinctly American and born of the diverse African Diaspora, Theodore blends provocative references to an Antebellum South, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, plantation life and a possible Afrofuturism in what he states is his goal “to center black individuals and their communities as trans-historical, trans-national, and metaphysical entities mobilizing against erasure in all forms.” The dramatic black bodies are portrayed in both real and mythological time, and as an artistic construct, staged in a slippage of time, as memory, real and imaged, not to be forgotten across history, geography, gender, the familiar and the unknown in what seems like an act of reclamation—strategy for remembrance, reflection, and agency.