David Huffman: Odyssey
Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce David Huffman: Odyssey, the Oakland artist’s second solo show with the gallery, running from January 13 to February 25, 2023. The exhibition includes paintings and works on paper created from 2004 to 2009, all populated by “Traumanauts”—Huffman’s Black astronauts navigating the political cosmos—against stark, abstract backgrounds. Combining formal abstraction and queries into social identity and race, Huffman’s work challenges the viewer to question their own placement within the tidal forces of civilization.
Born in 1963 in Berkeley and raised amongst revolutionaries, activists, and members of the Black Panther Party, Huffman is strongly influenced by radical practice in his work as a painter, illustrator, and educator. His interest in art began at an early age, assisting his mother, Dolores Davis, with the design of the famous “Free Huey [Newton]” flag widely used at protests and rallies at that time.
This cultivation of artistic expression in dialogue with the Black radical tradition have come to inform his association with Afrofuturism, manifested in the development of his Traumanauts as personalities emerging out of the psychological rupture caused by slavery. Though the Traumanauts series is lesser known relative to his other works, it is foundational to Huffman’s formal practice, using acrylic, gesso, and glitter to create evocative compositions chronicling these characters navigating memory, loss, and trauma.