Camae Ayewa is a graphic designer, photographer, collage artist, and musician performing as Moor Mother. She has performed at numerous festivals, colleges and universities, and has produced soundscapes for live theatre as well as book soundtracks. Ayewa is co-founder of Rockers! Philly, a recurring music festival focused on marginalized artists, and frontwoman of punk band The Mighty Paradocs. As a workshop facilitator she works with youth-centered programs, non-profits and shelters. She is the author of the forthcoming book of poetry Fetish Bones.

Rasheedah Phillips is founder of The Afrofuturist Affair, a grassroots community formed in 2011 to celebrate and promote Afrofuturistic and sci-fi concepts and culture through creative events and creative writing. She received a BA in criminal justice in 2005, and a JD in 2008, both from Temple University. She serves on the boards of several community organizations, and is a Managing Attorney for Community Legal Services of Philadelphia. She is the author of Recurrence Plot and Other Time Travel Tales (2014).

Working as the Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) collective, Ayewa and Phillips will create through their ABOG Fellowship Community Futurisms: Time & Memory in North Philly, a collaborative art and ethnographic research project exploring the impact of redevelopment and displacement within the North Philadelphia neighborhood known as Sharswood/Blumberg. They will use Afrofuturism as a critical activist theory to enact a process of collective envisioning and the preservation of the community’s cultural history and memory through the creation of a communal quantum time capsule, and incorporate models from the intersections of futurism, literature, visual remixing, sound, and activism as art.

Visit Black Quantum Futurism’s website

Artist portrait by Eva Wo.

Rasheedah Phillips. Photo: Eva Wo
Black Quantum Futurism: Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. Courtesy the artists.
Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa present at SPECULATIONS: Science Fiction, Chronopolitics, & Social Change at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, April 2015. Photo: Urban Video Project
BQF Experimental Workshop mini-retreat during residency at Neighborhood Time Exchange Studios, Philadelphia, April 2015. Workshops included site poetry and Anthropology of Consciousness, led by Camae Ayewa, and Quantum Event Mapping and Speculative Fiction and the Unknown, led by Rasheedah Phillips. Courtesy the artists.
Participants in Speculative Fiction & The Unknown workshop at BQF Experimental Workshop mini-retreat during residency at Neighborhood Time Exchange Studios, Philadelphia, April 2015. Courtesy the artists.
Quantum Event Mapping workshop with Rasheedah Phillips at Slought, Philadelphia, January 2016. Courtesy the artists.
BQF writing prompt. Courtesy the artists.
Black Quantum Futurism: Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. Courtesy the artists.
A Government of Times exhibition, Rebuild Foundation, Chicago, December 2015. Photo: le peuple qui manqué
Group zine made during a 3-part zine-making workshop with 4-6th graders at Martha Washington Elementary School ACE afterschool program. The zine-making workshops were a service project completed during a residency at Neighborhood Time Exchange in April 2015. Cover featured work of local author and comic book creator Alex Smith, who worked with class during one workshop to make collages. Courtesy the artists.
Courtesy the artists.
Rasheedah Phillips. Courtesy the artist.