Building a Bridge to You

by Daria Harper

At long last, we have reached the landscape which lies just ahead of rupture. The air itself laden with whispers of possibility, of what exists beyond our here and now. Within this seemingly never-ending expanse, everything seems to be waiting, or begging, to break apart, to come undone. Many of us, enduring turbulent heartache in the face of perpetual destruction, have unearthed new crevices within ourselves to hold grief and love and grief and love at the same time.¹

As we grow terrifyingly familiar with devastation, and lean into our comforts with more fervor, may we never forget the truth which exists on the other side of a blaze. A resolution made possible only by way of rebirth. These new horizons that we're reaching toward demand rupture, a fissure in the face of a ravaging system.

We are currently bearing witness not only to violence against our people by way of senseless genocides, but also to the forced deterioration of the very land which we inhabit. Our ways of learning, seeing, loving, knowing, and being are all seemingly under threat. It is in these moments especially—when refusing to look away from the world pulls me away from my center, when I feel distant from and unfamiliar with the depth of knowing which rests inside me—that I call on my guides. Forebearers in this realm and the next, whose wisdom both anchors me and allows me to fly.

For about a decade now, one such resting and galvanizing place where I am guaranteed to be ushered back to myself, is within the writings of foremother and science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler. Since my introduction to Butler as a teenager, every engagement with her words has become a convening with the divine. I was around seventeen when I first read Butler's 1993 science fiction novel, Parable of the Sower.  I held deep admiration for the characters in this text, who managed to live in a world that was painfully parallel to the one I inherited, particularly the way they moved through the storms in their lives with a sense of trust. Something between faith in God, and faith in oneself. I was emboldened, granted permission to harness all of the knowledge which I have access to. That which exists outside lines of sight, and yet allows me to shape the world in front me.

In the summer of 2020, several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I began hosting a virtual book club which was birthed, in part, by a decision I made to revisit Parable of the Sower. I was reaching for many things: closeness with my community, some semblance of a daily rhythm, and also texts which might offer refuge and invigoration with equal fervor. The story, set in the year 2024, orbits around a teenaged Black girl named Lauren Oya Olamina, resident of a fictitious and dystopic Southern California town called Robledo, who unexpectedly takes on the role of leader after her gated community is viciously attacked and set ablaze. Violently separated from her family, and forced to journey away from the only home she's ever known, Lauren garners strength and wherewithal by relying on a religion she's developed called Earthseed, which reminds us, among other parables, that:

A victim of God may,
Through forethought and planning,
Become a shaper of God.²

My decision to begin our book club by reading Parable of the Sower was an intentional one. On the one hand, it was many folks' first time encountering this text, and in the midst of a particularly unpredictable year for us all. The characters in Parable witness an authoritarian politician running for president, are forced to deal with the cataclysmic repercussions of climate change and environmental racism, and experience the severe weight of wealth gaps; all of which continue to resemble our reality. Yet, reading the book in that moment, especially as a collective, somehow felt like a salve. Within her texts, Butler summons worlds anew. Attuned to the patterns of history, she speaks of the future with a sense of clarity. Thus, making way for us to discover our own capacity to do the same. Butler's pages are full of characters grappling with their own self-possession and attuning themselves to their purposes, both as individuals and as a community. Ignited by Butler's unwavering prescience, her writing offered a poignant lens through which we might cast forth our own visions for the horizons we wish to stretch into. It became evident that to take heed of Butler's message also meant to answer her call.

Some three years later, I was conducting research when I stumbled upon an online archive of Shaper of God (2022), an art installation by an individual named American Artist. It had taken place in Los Angeles, just a twenty-minute drive from Butler's hometown. This work would become an ongoing project, a devotion to the life and legacy of Butler.

I soon realized that the person behind this body of work was the same American Artist who I first encountered from a close distance during my time as an undergraduate student at The New School university in New York. The conceptual artist and educator had received their MFA from The New School's Parsons School of Design in 2015, the same year that I matriculated. Only a few years into shaping the pillars of their professional artistic practice, they were instructing a course at the institution's Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, entitled Identity & The Body / Anti-Body, Designing Digital Knowledges: Production, Action, Labor alongside digital designer Marcea Decker.

Within Shaper of God, remnants of Artist's early thought experiments surrounding race, digital technology, place, and science take on expansive new forms. Presented at REDCAT in downtown LA, we take a glimpse into an entanglement between Artist and Butler that spans across time and space.

Set against stark white gallery walls, Artist's installation displays a less harrowing landscape than Butler illustrates throughout her text, at least initially. Upon a closer read, however, apocalyptic vignettes snap into clear view, reflecting and riffing on various scenes from the dystopian novel. The interior of the gallery is split in two by a towering partition of neatly laid stone, on top of which stands a stretch of gnarled and foreboding barbed wire. Titled Robledo Community Wall (Olamina cul-de-sac) (2022), this work parallels the prominent walls that (fail to) defend Lauren Olamina's predominantly Black Robledo community from external threats.

American Artist, Shaper of God, (Installation view) 2022. REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA.
Artist draws equally on Butler's personal life—a selection of Butler's journal entries and drawings are also featured in the exhibition—as they do from subject matter and themes within the author's work. A spiked steel gate juts out from Robledo Community Wall, giving way to a view of To Acorn (1984) (2022), a steel sculpture in the form of a bus stop, not unlike the posts where Butler would have waited on her travels throughout the sprawling city of Los Angeles. Butler never learned to drive, so her bus rides became a sacred time for her to write. At the base of the sculpture lies a grouping of firm steel leaves with their points stretched upwards, not unlike an agave plant that Butler surely encountered across the region. A slight curvature pulls the body of each leaf slightly away from the plant's core. Layered together, it's as if the small shrub has been frozen in the midst of a splendorous blossoming, opening up to the heavens while unyielding on earth. As Artist nods to this detail of Butler's life, they are also making a direct reference to Butler's text,
To Acorn.
renders the utopic geography of Lauren's post-Robledo community as a tangible destination. for Artist and Butler,
for us?
Throughout Parable, acorns are an ever-present signifier of rebirth and the possibility of new life. In the beginning of the book, Lauren and her family regularly consume acorn bread, something that Lauren's father learned from reading a book about how Indigenous people made use of the nut. At the end of the novel, when Lauren and her group reach their new home, they decide to name their small community 'Acorn,” and ceremoniously plant a number of oak trees throughout the land after burying their dead.

Both Artist and Butler spring from a lineage of Black people concerned with art and science in and around Southern California. Hailing from Altadena—where Butler (b. 1947) lived in the late 80s and 90s—the artist also attended Butler's alma mater, John Muir High School, next door in Pasadena, Butler's hometown. Artist has reflected on driving by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena as a teen on their way to school, noting, “...It was always this strange, almost sci-fi-ish site, because it's this extremely advanced space institute that's sitting in this canyon, that's kind of on its own, and it's surrounded by these suburbs. It felt like something out of a movie.”³ Butler, too, would have been mapping her own paths of lived experience around this site and the surrounding area.
'is there something in the water?”⁴

Environment and landscape, especially the aforementioned Los Angeles suburbs, thus act as vital connective tissue within the body of Shaper of God. These sites which hold a particular resonance for Artist and Butler, along with the fictionalized areas named in Parable, become portals to understanding shared knowledge systems, both empirically and divinely derived.


American Artist, Shaper of God, (Installation view) 2022. REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA.
Over the years of research which informed Shaper of God, Artist developed intentional connections with the individuals who have long carried Butler's legacy forward. The artist conducted part of their research for the exhibition during their time as a grantee at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Art + Technology Lab, who organized the exhibition in collaboration with JPL. They were in sustained dialogue with Ayana Jamieson, the co-founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. Additional research for the show was carried out at the Octavia E. Butler archive at The Huntington in Southern California.

I finally met Artist earlier this year during my visit to their studio in Brooklyn on an especially warm day in early August. We sat amidst some of their sculptural work, materials, and documents. Calm and measured, the artist spoke with me about what was presently on their mind in terms of their work and the world.

“I find that there's a surprising limit in people's imaginations of what my practice is, or what it can be,” Artist told me during our conversation that day. 'This is the longest I've spent exploring one idea, or set of ideas. It's been both short and long.”

It is this careful mining of the living, breathing archive, which made way for the tentacular, almost amorphous, expressions of Shaper of God. Artist's ability to oscillate between medium with clarity and precision can teach us a lot about the value of remaining malleable when enacting that which can only be described as memory work, a sort of cultural caretaking. Charting new ways to transmute their years of research into knowledge production, Artist had initially designed a Shaper of God web component, or 'research machine” as they call it, which was commissioned by KADIST via its Ways of Reading initiative and eventually led to the REDCAT installation. Entering the website, I was first struck by the sonic envelopment as a singular, ringing frequency poured out from my computer, before eventually settling into a quiet murmur. Simultaneously, an animation of a map of the United States appears, layered with a series of annotations pointing toward the western portion of the map, before eventually giving way to a grid of cells that resemble file cabinets. Designed to “form connections between the life and work of Octavia E. Butler[,] the presence of rocket science and sci-fi in Los Angeles, and a shared migration pattern of African-diasporic families from the South to the West [the Second Great Migration],”⁵ this web work (which is still undergoing development) will be populated over time by information culled from Artist's research, informing future iterations of the project.

Since the inception of Shaper of God, new tendrils of the work continue to emerge. In 2023, Artist employed AI to generate an image showing the architectural form of a chicken coop that belonged to Butler's grandmother before it burned down, which the author talked about in her personal writings. The work, Study for Estella Butler's Apple Valley Autonomy (2023), stemmed from Artist's meditation around the notion of making your way in a new place. Apple Valley refers to the desert town in California where Butler's grandmother procured some land after migrating from the South amidst racial terror in the 1930s. Artist, whose family also migrated to Southern California from the South and had to cultivate new ways of living, was able to trace additional overlap between Butler's personal life and their own lineage. Earlier this month, from November 1st through 4th, Artist presented The Monophobic Response (2024), a two-channel film and sculptural installation at LACMA which carefully alters the 1936 static rocket engine test that launched the United States's venture into space travel. The film saw Artist theirself carry out an actual rocket engine test fire in the Mojave Desert in the summer of 2024 and film this process.

Artist refers to their work as thought experiments; I like to think of them as provocations, and in some cases prophecies. Over the last decade, Artist's works have been born out of a set of questions aimed at subverting dominant narratives around race, technology, visibility, knowledge production, and consumption. Early works involved online performances, in which Artist thwarted algorithmic functions by posting coded information on social media and web platforms, often making use of different forms of redaction. In 2023, Artist mounted Security Theater, a site-specific installation consisting of a spherical black form hanging directly in the center of the Guggenheim Museum's famed rotunda. A thin silver ring wrapped around the object's diameter, its glossy surface reflecting the environment around it, while simultaneously concealing CCTV cameras in its core. Coinciding with Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility (2024), the installation extended into a room showing live surveillance of the inside of the museum. Entry into this section required visitors to lock their phones away in pouches to limit any documentation. Artist brought us face to face with a sort of collective performance of safety, and further, drew attention to our own participation in this spectacle, whether actively or passively. This work leaves me considering what pieces of ourselves—in the form of information, imagery, and beyond—are being taken from us, and which pieces we are giving away.

In 2013, Artist legally changed their name in an effort to muddle the commonly held assumptions around who might take on the title of, or be referred to, as an “American artist.” At the time, they were struggling to consider and call themselves an artist, wrestling with the weight of what assuming such a role might mean. By fully embodying an otherwise anonymous phrase, Artist has managed to de-center their own identity within their practice while simultaneously offering subtle assertions around the ways that race and gender impact the role of an “American artist.” By way of their practice, Artist reifies the truth that it is the duty of the artist to shepherd and carry forward the work of their forebearers, as much as it is to bring forth their own ideas.

A foregrounding element of both Artist and Butler's offerings is their unique ways of speaking truth to power—in the form of crumbling institutions, failed systems of governance, and beyond. In a conversation with Tananarive Due for the Los Angeles Times, the renowned science fiction author and educator asked the artist to reflect on their own ideal community, in the spirit of Earthseed, and share something which they “see[k] shelter from.” Artist responded: “One thing that I think about seeking shelter from, which hasn't really been possible for me, is from institutional obligation. From having to align myself with institutions that I feel are compromising my values.”⁶ This admittance rings true for countless artists and cultural workers—myself included—who can feel beholden to institutions that are swift to extract their wisdom, and just as swift to discard any traces of them from the record, an act rooted in the same lack of care which allows for the perpetual violence against (and attempted erasure of) our physical bodies on a global scale. Artist reminds us that engagement with such institutions, nearly always in the name of bountiful resources and support, often demands that the work take on disruptive forms. How might we wrestle with the history of these establishments to chart forth in new territory? As these institutions become obsolete before our eyes, what unfeigned places of shelter might we build in their stead?

While Artist's research-work beside Butler's footpaths holds a mirror to our reality surrounding the limitations and harms of the evergrowing systems which govern our world, it also offers a subtle undercurrent which I find myself clinging to. It's not exactly hope, but rather a sense of responsibility on a universal scale. A remembrance that as we collectively trace and chronicle our patterns, and practice forethought and planning, we hold some power to shape what we want this reality, this existence, to be. That we may shape God.

“I began writing about power because I had so little.”
–Octavia E. Butler

1. vanessa german, GRIEF AND LOVE AND GRIEF AND LOVE AT THE SAME TIME, 2024, https://www.kasmingallery.com/content/feature/3576/43267/ ↩


2. Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993 ↩


3. Tananarive Due, “What if we were already living in Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower'?”, Los Angeles Times, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-05-18/american-artist-new-exhibition-excavates-the-future-octavia-butler-built-in-her-work ↩


4. Shaper of God (research machine) by American Artist, 2021‐ongoing, https://kadist.org/program/shaper-of-god/ ↩


5. Ibid. ↩


6. Tananarive Due, “What if we were already living in Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower'?“, Los Angeles Times, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-05-18/american-artist-new-exhibition-excavates-the-future-octavia-butler-built-in-her-work ↩

Photo by Jasmine Rose.

Daria Simone Harper is a Brooklyn-based art writer and the co-Editor in Chief of Jupiter Magazine. She is a former Assistant Editor of Digital Content at David Zwirner in New York. Her work has been featured in publications including Burnaway Magazine, Cultured Magazine, ESSENCE, Hyperallergic, i-D, and W Magazine, among others. Harper is also the founder of The Art of It All, an arts and culture podcast featuring candid conversations amongst emerging and established artists of color about work, life, and spirituality.