Aruna D’Souza
Placemaking and escape-making: a show at Pioneer Works explores Black geographies and histories through connections to Octavia Butler’s life and literature.
American Artist: Shaper of God, installation view. Courtesy Pioneer Works.
American Artist: Shaper of God, curated by Vivian Chui, Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn, through April 13, 2025
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As wildfires ripped through Los Angeles just weeks ago—at the very moment American Artist was installing their exhibition, Shaper of God, at Pioneer Works—Teen Vogue (one of the best remaining sources of political analysis) published a story by Lex McMenamin titled “Black Sci-Fi Writer Octavia Butler Predicted the Dystopia of the LA Fires by Studying History.” Though it’s only the most recent acknowledgment of the author’s prescience, it is perhaps the most poignant. One community that went up in flames was Altadena, a historically Black area just outside the city, populated by many whose roots trace back to Black Southerners who migrated there to free themselves from racial violence, only to find new forms in California. Altadena was Butler’s home—and where Artist grew up as well. Their aunts went to John Muir High School in nearby Pasadena at the same time as Butler; Artist attended some decades later, in the early aughts.
American Artist: Shaper of God, installation view. Courtesy Pioneer Works. Pictured: The Monophobic Response (Film, 2CH), 2024. Two-channel HD video with sound, 18 minutes 19 seconds.
In 2020, Artist began delving into the echoes between their personal history and Butler’s, and between today’s world and the one Butler described back in 1993 in the first of her Parable novels, Parable of the Sower. (The Pioneer Works show is the most ambitious iteration of a project that has been developed in previous exhibits at REDCAT, Kadist, and LACMA.) Set in 2024, Butler’s text tells a story of a country descended into chaos, in which the long-term effects of racial capitalism, political rot, mass impoverishment, and ecocide have become horrifyingly apparent. Cities burn. Mobs run amok. People starve. Led by a young woman, Lauren Oya Olamina, a small group of people trying only to survive band together to establish a self-reliant community based on religious principles that Lauren outlines in a text she calls Earthseed, which, among other things, imagines its adherents escaping the impossibility of life on our planet by decamping to Mars.
American Artist: Shaper of God, installation view. Courtesy Pioneer Works. Pictured: Octavia E. Butler Papers: mssOEB 1-9062: Local Documents, 2025; and Octavia E. Butler Papers: mssOEB 1-9062: Maps, 2025.
The exhibition starts with the archive. In a long, wood vitrine, we see selections from Octavia E. Butler Papers: mssOEB 1-9062: Local Documents (2025) and Octavia E. Butler Papers: mssOEB 1-9062: Maps (2025). These are precise replicas of items Artist consulted in the Huntington Library’s collection (the author’s research notes; bus schedules; her library card; a diagram of Acorn, the community Lauren and her group build in Northern California; and more), done in pencil on the eraser-pink stationery the institution provides to researchers. Nearby is a more speculative archive: Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy (2024) is a sculptural reconstruction of Butler’s grandmother’s chicken coop, based on historical photographs and recollections from Artist’s relatives of seeing such farm sheds growing up, all of which were fed into an AI program to create a rendering. Instead of fowl, the interior shelves hold archival boxes, putatively filled with Butler’s papers. Cognizant of how earlier generations of Black folks found ways to sustain themselves through forms of self-reliance like producing their own food, Artist presents the humble henhouse as a symbol of placemaking and survival in hostile environments.
American Artist: Shaper of God, installation view. Courtesy Pioneer Works. Pictured: Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy, 2024.
The Monophobic Response is the shared title of two works from 2024, a sculptural installation and a two-channel, wall-size video projection. (The phrase comes from Butler’s 1995 essay about humanity’s fear of difference, and the social relations that are produced from that fear.) The first is a fully functional copy of a rocket engine created by students at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab, the precursor of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in 1936; the device was originally tested in the Arroyo Seco Canyon, near Altadena. The video shows a group of people gathered by Artist—rocket engineers, scholars of Butler’s work, artists, and friends—operating the same device in the desert; they play the roles of Earthseed members trying to achieve their destiny of traveling to another planet.
American Artist: Shaper of God, installation view. Courtesy Pioneer Works. Pictured, left: The Monophobic Response (sculpture), 2024. Right: The Monophobic Response (Film, 2CH), 2024.
One of the central messages of the Parable series, as Artist explains in the show’s catalog, is that “when demagogues and oligarchs hold power and oppose everything you value, you’d better have an escape plan.” Against the scrappy hopefulness and ingenuity represented by The Monophobic Response, another video on view, Alicia Catalina Godinez Leal (2024), raises questions about the ethical issues involved in such imagined placemaking. It takes the form of a fictional news report, about the death of an astronaut described in Parable of the Sower, in which members of the deceased woman’s family and community in some cases express the belief that she died in service of a greater good, and in others decry the hubris of the whole enterprise of space exploration when we should be concentrating on saving life on earth.
American Artist: Shaper of God, installation view. Courtesy Pioneer Works. Pictured, center background, on-screen: Alicia Catalina Godinez Leal, 2024.
Butler’s novel came out seven years after the Challenger disaster; I wonder if then, when space travel was solely the province of NASA and other state-run agencies around the world, she could have imagined today’s Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses, Richard Bransons, and other billionaires who likewise see space as the solution to the increasing inhabitability of our planet. As opposed to the followers of Earthseed, who aim to create a new environment free from the ills of this decrepit place, the demagogues and oligarchs only aspire to extend those ills to new, virgin territories—a new form of colonization and conquest, a perverse extension of the logic of gated communities and private firefighters and personal flight controllers (as Donald Trump claimed this week to have). By materializing both the immediacy of Butler’s speculative universe in the now and its relationship to history in their installation, Artist compels us to think about the political implications of our escape plans.
American Artist: Shaper of God, installation view. Courtesy Pioneer Works.
I haven’t even mentioned the other videos in the show, one of which is a campaign ad for “Christopher Donner,” Butler’s fictional politician, whose script borrows from Ye’s presidential run in 2020; or the reading room based on the one in the house Lauren had to flee to get away from violent looters; or the vintage bus-stop signs that nod to the routes Butler had to travel to get to her school and the library because she didn’t drive. Each of these connects in countless ways—to Parable of the Sower, to Butler’s and Artist’s lives, to Black geographies and histories, to a million other things. I would expect no less from a thinker like Artist, whose earlier work—much of which takes the form of digital art—has predisposed them, as they describe it in the catalog, to focus on “the ethos of networks and hyperconnectivity,” whatever the medium. It’s hard to imagine a more urgent exhibition, as so many of us are figuring out how to create, sustain, and protect our communities from the daily onslaught of life in America.
Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press last summer.