Azikiwe Mohammed: 396 Wortman Ave

About

Mohammed’s latest body of work explores themes of Blackness as seen through the images seen hanging on the walls, laying on coffee tables and printed on hand towels of Black homes spread across America.

In the late ‘90s to early 2000s, Mohammed spent considerable time out in Brooklyn’s New Lots area. The singularity of the sights seen there mirrored the tales he heard at home, in the homes of his cousins, aunties and uncles, and these Black visions of perseverance, prosperity and preemptive resistance created a feedback loop of images, many of which are on display here.

Mohammed illustrates these scenes for the knowing and uninitiated alike with a familiarity that can only come from a place of experiential knowledge. The artist intends to offer them back to the Black ethers from which they came. By working with Morales to recreate these liminal spaces, Mohammed seeks to offer an open look into a shared idea- one of a Blackness that exists outside of time constraints or location-based concerns, representing a truly shared vision that pulls from a collective consciousness. The constant extance of this idealogical flex space is one of the main tenets of a Blackness as old as time, regardless from whence it grows.

Mohammed hopes that by offering these “views from inside to our collective outside" may he give thanks to those that have allowed him the vision that has generated the sights in this show.

“May 396 Wortman Ave. tell a tale of the lives once lived and for those who have yet to, as the work is never done. There is always more to see.”