Los Angeles–based artist Timothy Washington (b. 1946) has crafted a visionary display of mixed-media works in his Leimert Park residence for over fifty years. A prominent figure during the Black Arts Movement—a key moment in the 1960s and 1970s when African American artists and writers collectively celebrated black culture—Washington has been a pioneer of socio-politically charged work ever since, exhibiting both locally and nationally with renowned fellow artists, such as Charles White and David Hammons. In the late 1970s, after years of creating his celebrated dry point drawings and carved wooden sculptures, he sought to innovate his use of materials and techniques and shifted to producing futuristic assemblage sculptures, which he continues to make today. To create them, Washington dips cotton in white glue, then applies it to shaped wire-hanger armatures, while also embedding myriad objects that he finds in his neighborhood or collects through family and friends.

This exhibition presents Washington’s very first installation project, Citizen/Ship (2019), a powerful yet playful collection of works that meld American patriotism with Afrofuturistic narratives of fantasy and science fiction. Through references to technology, utopia, and mysticism, Timothy Washington: Citizen/Ship speaks to both the negative and positive aspects of American culture, emphasizing issues that affect black lives: violence, racism, and displacement, but also survival, hope, love, and reconciliation.