Supply: iOne Digital Inventive Companies
“Playing the Cosmic Strings,” a 1,200 square-foot mural, sits excessive on a wall exterior of Heinz Corridor in downtown Pittsburgh’s busy Cultural District. Commissioned in October 2021 by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, the mural is an homage to a West African mythology of how the universe started.
It’s a shimmering constellation, an outline of an androgynous or queer Black African divine being, and it tells a multilayered story of a cosmic spider whose net represents interlocking hyperlinks of the universe, the strings of a kid’s hand recreation, and the sacred vitality that flows into on a regular basis life and creation, together with concord and music (therefore the symbolic attachment with the symphony).
The artwork will stay up till fall 2026, giving 1000’s an introduction to an origin story from Africa and a glimpse of how the sacred echoes past colonial notions of divinity and the cisgendered figures of Adam and Eve.
Michael Owunna is a multimedia artist, engineer, and the creator of the guide Limitless Africans. | Supply: Emmai Alaquiva
Conveying a broader notion of divinity is a part of the objective for Rainbow Serpent, a four-year-old collective of Black LGBTQ artists and students who produced the mural.
Although based mostly in Pittsburgh, the nonprofit has a world community, with individuals collaborating throughout the US, England, and Nigeria.
It attracts its identify partially from the Delight flag, which represents the varied LGBTQ group, and from the pantheon of African traditions, the place the serpent is a typical determine throughout cosmologies.
“Sharing African cosmology is the bottom of the work we do,” says co-founder Mikael Owunna, explaining {that a} key mission is to get well conventional African information programs.
When these cultural and non secular traditions are recovered, says Marques Redd, additionally a Rainbow Serpent co-founder, it instills delight and id within the Black LGBTQ group. It additionally preserves cultural knowledge and challenges the dominant, monolithic tales which have marginalized or erased Black and LGBTQ individuals for hundreds of years.
Dr. Marques Redd is an unbiased scholar, multimedia artist and conventional African cosmologist. | Supply: Emmai Alaquiva
To help on this restoration, the collective makes use of artwork, dwell efficiency, rising applied sciences, and therapeutic protocols to attract on and honor these narratives, practices, and knowledge from the previous—a attain that propels its future.
A number of years in the past, a live performance with the Pittsburgh Symphony drew 1,400 individuals, and a latest exhibit of 16 life-size sculptures on the Pittsburgh Glass Middle drew greater than 800 to the opening. Public art work in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Tampa, and different cities has uncovered thousands and thousands to numerous African non secular programs. Later this 12 months, the collective plans to launch filmmaking tasks, a author’s retreat in Martha’s Winery, a mural in Pittsburgh devoted to Martin Delany, the abolitionist and father of Black nationalism who lived within the metropolis for greater than 20 years, and new programming in Brazil, Sweden, Scotland, and London.
And now, Rainbow Serpent will deepen its impression with a brand new residency for artist Dominique Swift, a Philadelphia native and College of Pittsburgh graduate who’s growing a collection of 12 work impressed by Uli, a conventional artwork fashion by Igbo ladies in Southeastern Nigeria. The artwork, which generally is stained onto the physique or painted onto buildings, displays nature and the motion of celestial our bodies.
Dominique Swift is in residency at Rainbow Serpent to work on a collection of work entitled Uli Woke up. | Supply: Dominique Swift
Swift’s mission, “Uli Woke up: In Her Identify,” attracts from the Igbo custom the place a new child receives a reputation on its twelfth day of life. She says her 12 work will narrate “the journey of the primary 12 days of life, the journey of the unfolding of the universe; and the journey of turning into an artist deeply related to tradition and historical past.”
She’s excited, she says, “to make use of Uli artwork to convey vital narratives about womanhood and the transmission of generational information and … as a robust technique of preserving and speaking cultural heritage, values, and id.”
All the collective’s achievements are vital contemplating that all of them move from an preliminary assembly of two strangers in 2020.
A mutual good friend launched Owunna, a Pittsburgh native who was starting to deepen his information on African cosmology, to Redd, a graduate of Harvard who earned a PhD from the College of California-Berkeley and a latest transplant to Pittsburgh who had greater than 20 years of research on the topic. Connecting simply earlier than the pandemic, they continued their conversations on Zoom and launched a guide group for Black LGBTQ individuals excited by African mythology with queer and androgynous themes. It quickly grew, turning into a group.
The group’s development was aided by the co-development of Obi Mbu (The Primordial Home), a Rainbow Serpent movie impressed by the group’s readings on West African Igbo cosmology, which is Owunna’s ethnic heritage. It describes two androgynous deities that create your entire universe by way of dance.
The movie got here out in 2021 and has toured greater than 20 places throughout the nation.
Michael Owunna’s “Taking part in the Cosmic Strings” mural was showcased on the aspect of Heinz Corridor to have a good time the constructing’s fiftieth anniversary as the house of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. | Supply: Rainbow Serpent
Together with its rising creative outreach, Redd additionally emphasizes that Rainbow Serpent’s work empowers the Black LGBTQ group by offering a platform for self-representation and raises consciousness in regards to the points dealing with the group.
“Within the context of rising anti-LGBTQ laws and protracted racial discrimination, Rainbow Serpent’s work gives a counter-narrative that underscores the resilience, creativity, and contributions of Black LGBTQ people,” says Redd. “The academic parts of our tasks, equivalent to the general public conversations and workshops accompanying our creative works, foster vital discourse and promote higher understanding.”
This visibility is part of why Rainbow Serpent is an “institutional dwelling” for a lot of Black Queer creatives, says Owunna. It ignited an enthusiasm and a belonging, and creatives felt they didn’t want to go away Pittsburgh for different cities to search out sources.
“We felt like we will construct it right here,” Owunna says, “and it may be actually highly effective.”
Owunna values the rising group. A number of years in the past, he left his job in tech and used his ardour for images to discover LGBTQ African immigrant narratives. He traveled to 10 nations and photographed 50 LGBTQ African immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers producing a guide that related up to date queer Africans to precolonial queer histories and identities.
A poster from the Rainbow Serpent movie Obi Mbu (The Primordial Home). | Supply: Rainbow Serpent
“I discovered in regards to the sacred position that individuals who would now be recognized as LGBTQ had inside conventional African societies,” says Owunna. “They possessed energies each masculine and female and had particular connection to the sacred. They have been the diviners, the shamans, the mystics, and the healers of the group—the gatekeepers of the spirit world.”
By way of his work, Owunna found an “underground community” of creatives and students all searching for to unlock pre-colonial identities that showcase a variety of sexuality and gender identities on the African continent.
The invention, he says, “sparked my whole journey as an artist and excited about how I can use visible tradition to share this info.”
Rainbow Serpent is necessary work, Owunna says. For him, it has “pulled again the veil on what it means to be African and showcases narratives which have been willfully suppressed.”
“By doing this analysis and creating a brand new archive of Black LGBTQ work, we’re crafting a useful resource for the longer term,” he says. “I’m excited in regards to the catalytic potential of queer African cosmologies to remodel how we perceive ourselves and the world.”
Ervin Dyer is a author who focuses his storytelling on Africana life and tradition.
SEE ALSO:
