Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago

As part of our 20th Anniversary programming, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture presents a solo exhibition featuring the work of Krista Franklin, a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist whose writing, visual art, and performance-based work simultaneously pay homage to and destabilize popular notions around identity, power, and the familiar. Like Water is built around Franklin’s mythological character Naima Brown and the legacy of fictional black women who have come before and after her—shapeshifting women like those depicted in the novels of Octavia E. Butler. Taking cues from the literal and metaphorical aspects of Franklin’s body of work, this exhibition considers the fluid nature of memory, both collective and individual, and the relationship between amorphous ways of being and self-determination.