A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

D. Denenge Duyst- Akpem

Associate Professor, Adjunct

Bio

D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem is a space sculptor and award-winning teacher, artist, and writer whose practice and scholarship bridge disciplines of design, ritual, and ecology. She is Associate Professor, Adjunct, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, offering graduate and undergraduate courses, and received a 2018 Marion Kryczka Excellence in Teaching Award and one of two inaugural Diversity Advisory Group 2016 Teaching Awards for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion. She is a 2020 LaBecque Laureate, 2016-17 Rebuild Foundation/U-Chicago Place Lab Fellow, and 2014 NEH Institute Fellow. She holds an MFA in Performance from SAIC and BA from Smith College.

Personal Statement

As founder of Denenge Design and In The Luscious Garden, focused on holistic, conceptual approaches to human-centered design, Duyst-Akpem creates fantastical interactive environments and performances interrogate, titillate, decolonize, and empower, inspired by Sun Ra and asking: "Who controls the future?” “Afro-Futurism: Pathways to Black Liberation”—now titled “Afrofuturity”--was an early multi-disciplinary offering in the field, and “Take Root Among The Stars: The Legacy of Octavia Butler, Surviving the 21st Century & Beyond” included urban foraging, a dynamic panel of Butler experts, and exhibition of survival “go” packs based on Butler’s prophetic novel Parable of the Sower.

Features include: AFRIFUTURI 02022020 monograph and The Camo Coat Collection runway and launch on February 2, 2020 at Blanc Gallery in historic Bronzeville, Chicago; Corpus Meum at the Arts Club of Chicago; High Priestess of the Intergalactic Federation, Special Envoy to Mars for Black Quantum Futurism: Temporal Deprogramming, ICA London, 2019 (originally commissioned for NASA/Blumberg Becoming Interplanetary/Decolonizing Mars, U.S. Library of Congress, 2018); Black Light Primal Nun ‘A’ Presents The Ramm Riff for Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder “No Guts, No Galaxy”, Red Bull Arts NY, 2018; La Fantaisie Ibeji experimental performance film; audience-interactive activation of Houston Conwill Rivers cosmogram with Nyugen E. Smith, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2018; and voice of Yetunde for animation The Golden Chain by Adebukola Bodunrin and Ezra Claytan Daniels (originally for Black Radical Imagination film series curated by Erin Christovale and Amir George), now part of the Whitney Museum permanent collection.

Duyst-Akpem has written on Afro-Futurism and the Osanyin Commemorative Portrait Series for Kunsthaus Zürich Fly Me to the Moon exhibition and Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin Connecting Afro Futures. Fashion x Hair x Design; and on the work of AFRICOBRA co-founder Jae Jarrell published by Kavi Gupta Gallery for the 58th Venice Biennale. Selected features on Duyst-Akpem and her work include: SixtyAntennae: The Journal of Art and NatureARTNewsChicago TribuneChicago Sun TimesHow We Get to Next with Afrofutures UK, Chicago MagazineTheaster Gates: How To Build a House Museum for AGO, Toronto, Fired Up! Ready to Go!: Finding Beauty, Demanding Equity: An African American Life in Art, The Collections of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, the latter titles listed as top two on Culture Type’s “18 Best Black Art Books of 2018”, and in virtual exhibitions for Burning Man 2020, Brand New Mesh by Comm-Post (Veracruz, Mexico), PS1/Center for Afrofuturist Studies (Iowa City, IA), and Kavi Gupta Editions Black Voices Initiative.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This seminar consists of weekly lectures, colloquia, and studio visits. Students are expected to arrive with completed and semi-completed works and be prepared to make and re-make new works throughout the summer sessions. A wide variety of readings chosen by faculty will guide discussions that concentrate on problems concerning methods of artmaking, distribution, and interpretation. Readings will include examples drawn from the emerging category of conceptual writing as well as crucial art historical texts, literature, and poetry.

Class Number

1210

Credits

4.5

Description

This course takes the concept of ?sculpting space? as a springboard for investigations into commemorative design, speculative architecture, and foundational sacred systems in Africa and the African Diaspora, rooted in Afro-Futurism and ?visions of a liberated future? (Larry Neal), considering the intentional sculpting of space as pathway to transformation for self and community. Areas covered will include: commemoration and protection in textile; Yoruba aesthetic of the cool in design; sacred geometry in object and environment; West African modernist and speculative architecture; contemporary designers; and inhabiting permanent spaces of transition.

Class Number

1295

Credits

3