Manzel Bowman

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American artist Manzel Bowman (b 1985) works with collage to create digital images of Afrofuturistic vitality and range. The stylisation and recombination of prior elements construes faces, often masked, with cosmic vistas, ancient monuments and traditional, largely East African dress and manner. The juxtaposition of originalist past and imagined high-tech future is the point of the art, a challenge to the clichés of SF Art not just in terms of centring the Black subject, but as a formal repudiation of the pseudo-realist, conventionalised composition and framings.


Here the female subject's lip-plate (a form of body adornment particularly associated with the Surma and Mursi people of Ethiopia) is, wittily, a flying saucer, and the woman's headdress a domed city. This kind of mannerist playfulness is common in Bowman's art, although a more comprehensive collage and assemblage is more typical than this kind of visual pun,

A fluent organicism is often combined, cyborg-style, with glittering gold and silver high-tech prosthesis.



Bowman has described his artistic project as, in effect, remedial: ‘I am trying to bring about a correction to the misrepresentation of my people, and the best way I can do that is by creating pieces and scenes daily to counter America's normative. I just want to see black people flourish the way they are supposed to!’ There is, arguably, a larger visual pun, or rhyme, in many of his artworks: the blackness of space, the black skin of his subjects, the one embodying the potential and cosmic scope of the other.


This image from 2021 positions its subject facing away from us, towards the open-endedness of space and an appealing blue world, the individual having previously (as it seems) cracked the wall of ‘White’ technology in two to allow him access. Blacks and browns, cerulean blues, silvers and golds, render the liberational open-endedness. This image from 2020 is actually called ‘Odyssey Cerulean’:


Whether the lack of Bowman cover art reflects a disinclination on his part to take-on such commissions from publishers, a lapse in those same commissioners, or a shift in the logic of professional art representative of the 21st-century: he sells his art directly via the internet, and designs and sells Afrofuturist Tarot card packs. He also designs and sells T-shirts, as with this scintillant and striking design from 2024, called, playfully enough, ‘Pew Pew Pew’:



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