Casey Kaplan
David Huffman
MUSEUM OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
“Terra Incognita” is the first museum show to focus on painter David Huffman’s deeply engaging “Traumanaut” works: a meditative action series—if such a thing were possible—that he began in the early 1990s. This extended walkabout through the artist’s Afrofuturist-inflected narratives features Black men in NASA-style space suits encountering a variety of landscapes and situations. Even Huffman himself makes an appearance in a video, wearing a replica suit and gently hugging trees.
Born in 1963 and raised in Berkeley, California, Huffman grew up attending Black Panther rallies while simultaneously witnessing the apex of the American space program via the historic 1969 moon landing. Later, as a young artist, he found himself considering the “happy darky” imagery of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a beaming Aunt Jemima, for example, or the tooth-baring grins worn by blackface figures in minstrel shows. He began making works in a range of media—painting, prints, even ceramics—investigating what this “traumasmile” (to borrow the artist’s term) really meant. For him, this grimace was not an expression of happiness or conciliation, but rather a survival strategy adopted in response to white hostility and racism.
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