Durham Arts Guild highlights Sun Ra memorabilia

This month, the Durham Art Guild hosts Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground 1954 – 68. The exhibition presents artwork created by and about Afro-Futurist musician Sun Ra and his associates, salvaged from a condemned house after the death of Ra’s business partner, Alton Abraham. Together Ra and Abraham founded El Saturn Records, one of the first artist-created labels. El Saturn was meant, in part, to further the ideal of black power and the vision of a separatist community of black artists creating for black consumers.

Much of the exhibit documents El Saturn’s approach to printing album covers, mainly with an intergalactic theme. The pieces include brainstormed sketches for LP covers, linoleum stamps, silkscreen designs and final album covers. A documentary features Ra preaching his belief that if things on Earth got any worse, humans would have to move to Saturn and start over. At one point, the documentary swells chaotically into the big band-style jazz music Ra composes and plays. His music is meant to transport listeners out of this world and into “the space feeling” of happiness, which he believes humans have lost the ability to perceive.

The exhibition is part of a larger celebration of Sun Ra, which includes an upcoming lecture and a performance by the latest iteration of the band. Informed by prior knowledge of Ra and his beliefs, the art show becomes more compelling. The works, however, are unexplained aside from a brief cataloged list. Some of the art is graphically interesting and contains traces of Ra’s aggressive individualism and eccentricity, yet the display lacks the agitated energy with which Ra tried to move people into seeing the world and living differently.