The Oakland artist’s second solo show, will run 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 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.
At nearly seven-feet tall, the largest piece in the exhibition Make Love Not War (2006) spans three freestanding painted door panels, upon which scenes of violent conflict unfold. This work, made amidst the context of the Bush presidency in 2006, and recalling anti-Vietnam War activism of the 1960s and 70s, speaks to the entrapment caused by political structures against the human desire for freedom and liberation. The opposite side of the work drives home messages of resistance with six Traumanauts holding various protest signs reading “WAGE PEACE NOT WAR,” “FREE THE HUMANS,” and “DON’T VOTE FOR WAR.”
Another work, The Seeker (2005), presents a lone Traumanaut drifting through a whirling cosmos. In the context of the Black diasporic experience, Traumanauts are always in transit in search of home, and the means to get there. Though rife with uncertainty, Huffman’s figures are constantly exploring unseen horizons, demanding nothing less than new universes, worlds, and ways of finding themselves anew.
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