“The relationship it has to Sun Ra is because I did a huge mural of him in Hayes Valley, and his quote, ‘If you’re not a myth whose reality are you?’ really sat potently in me.
It’s the silhouette form of a Black person, but inside you see the cosmos.
This piece is a Black person as the universe, but from the position of the universe being like a sitter in a portrait. “I was reading Rumi really heavily at one point, and came to this quote where he says, ‘You are the universe in ecstatic motion,” and that led me to the idea of cosmic Black people, or Black people are the living embodiment of the universe. “The original ideas came at the intersection between Rumi and Sun Ra,” he said. There is a pedagogical element that insists itself in the work, though in subtle and non-intrusive ways.
Even with the impressive scale of and skill of his current project, the scope of his work calls for the viewer to do more than simply observe it. I am concerned with generating images so poetic and true to my experiences that it suspends the viewer’s disbelief in the beauty of Blackness.”Īll of Burch’s work deserves close reading, because of his multi-layered approach to his subjects. My practice includes the public space, because it is the most influential space to confront negative narratives about my being. I approached this project from the deep need to question societal notions within the value of Blackness. “The title of the piece is Jupiter Redding, returned endowed with everything that this world denied them. He reached out to me and said he wanted to give me a big wall in the city and gave me the artistic freedom to create what I wanted to create. It’s a seven-story mural overlooking the Tenderloin this huge, cosmic Black person,” he said. This week, Burch unveiled a large mural in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, and like everything he’s done up to this point, there’s more to the piece than meets the eye. We’ve known each other for more than a handful of years, and still, every time we speak, I find even more ways we’re connected.īurch’s work is infused with the literary Black radical tradition and touches of what Ishmael Reed dubbed a Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic, tapping into folklore and folk-ways as guiding principles, and Afrosurrealism, which addresses current concerns, and questions the status quo around issues of identity, spirituality and social justice. Full disclosure: Christopher Burch is my brother, comrade, friend and inspiration.
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