Born and raised in Pasadena, California, visionary author Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) transformed Southern California into the backdrop for stories that fundamentally reshaped the landscape of Speculative Fiction and what would later become Afrofuturism. Her explorations of power, race, gender, and survival continue to serve as a vital blueprint for contemporary artists across various disciplines. Opening on what would be Butler’s 80th year, Dream Mask: The Light and Dark Legacies of Octavia E. Butler honors Butler’s enduring legacy, bringing together work from Black Kirby and other artists that are actively in dialogue with and expand upon Butler’s motifs, stories, and characters.

Dream Mask: The Light and Dark Legacies of Octavia E. Butler is the sixth Black Kirby Project at UCR ARTS. Previous projects include Luke Cage: Hero for Higher (2018), Reflection Eternal: The Candyman Illustrated Syllabus (2019), Ebon: Fear of a Black Planet (2022), Black Kirby X: Ten Years of Remix and Revolution (2022), and Whatever Happened to Dyno-Woman: The Alternative History of an Afrofuturist Icon (2024).

About the artists

Black Kirby is a shared pseudonym that is Stacey Robinson (Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and Illustration, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) and John Jennings (Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside). Black Kirby functions as a rhetorical tool by sampling and remixing comic legend Jack Kirby’s bold forms and energetic ideas combined with themes centered around Afrofuturism, social justice, representation, magical realism, and using the culture of Hip Hop as a methodology for creating visual communication. It also utilizes the notion of an alter-ego as a symbolic allegory for DuBoisian “double-consciousness” theory. Black Kirby frequently uses the medium and visual vernacular of comics as a conceptual crossroads to examine identity as a socialized concept through bricolage, pastiche, oppositional juxtapositions, and deconstruction. It is the artists’ hope to destabilize various ideas of “Blackness” in order to promote a broader spectrum of Black subjectivity.

John Jennings is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings’ current projects include the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), and the Eisner-winning, Bram Stoker Award-winning, New York Times best-selling graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred. Jennings is also founder and curator of the ABRAMS Megascope line of graphic novels.

Stacey A. Robinson is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Robinson was a 2019-2020 Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and completed his MFA at the University at Buffalo in 2015. He is a graphic designer, exhibition artist, illustrator, graphic novelist. and DJ. His multimedia work discusses decolonized Black futures through collage, motion graphics, illustration, and DJing.

Dream Mask: The Light and Dark Legacies of Octavia E. Butler is organized by Black Kirby and UCR ARTS. Nikolay Maslov, Curator of Special Projects at UCR ARTS, is coordinating curator. Programs at UCR ARTS are supported by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UCR, and by the City of Riverside. This exhibition is co-sponsored by the Earth Seed Foundation.

Image courtesy of John Jennings.