In this episode we hear from New York-based narrative artist, producer, and curator Evan Starling-Davis who excavates the everyday stories pushed beneath the margins of our society. Navigating his lens as a Black and queer digital-age griot, Evan’s work breaches the hard facts, personal truths, and surreal realities we bury ourselves in. His artistic practice is situated within art immersion, mindfulness pedagogy, and experiential technology, and is heavily guided by the Black Speculative Arts Movement (Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturism specifically).

Evan Starling-Davis is in conversation with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger who is a recurring host with Broken Boxes and who often accesses speculative fiction in his practice from the perspective of an Indigenous person of the Great Plains of North America. This episode was recorded at Colgate University in Hamilton New York as a part of a recent artist residency. Special thanks to Nick West, Curator of Picker Art Gallery for the introductions to Evan Starling-Davis and for organizing a studio on campus to record this conversation.

Evan Starling-Davis is a New York-based narrative artist, producer, and curator, excavating the everyday stories pushed beneath the margins of our society. Navigating his lens as a Black and queer digital-age griot, Evan’s work breaches the hard facts, personal truths, and surreal realities we bury ourselves in. A doctoral candidate of Literacy Education at Syracuse University with a focus in extended reality (XR) technology, Starling-Davis researches and facilitates arts-based literacy and social justice projects and interventions for Black communities in the US. His artistic practice is situated within art immersion, mindfulness pedagogy, and experiential technology, and is heavily guided by the Black Speculative Arts Movement (Afrosurrealism and Afrofuturism specifically). To create new pathways for Black imagination and media literacy to flourish, Evan combines motivational design, multimedia arts, and immersive technology in striking new ways. Exploring immersive technologies as tools of healing (such as virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality) his most recent project, Hidden Fragments Breathing, models the radical potential immersive art exposure has to transform literacy in Black communities across the Rust Belt. As a curator with meticulous attention-to-detail, Starling-Davis has managed public humanities projects and community-based art experiences from conception to completion. His interdisciplinary projects have been featured in art galleries, museums, and theaters internationally. More recently, he has been selected as a 2020-2021 Humanities NY Public Humanities Fellow, a 2019-2020 Louise B. and Bernard G. Palitz Art Scholar, and a 2018-2019 Syracuse University McKean Scholar.

Music Featured: Saffron by MF DOOM from Metal Fingers Presents: Special Herbs Vol. 1 & 2