Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Calvin Warren calls it an 'ontological equation'/or methods of estimating the odds to rise in the coming centuries

Calvin Warren calls it an ‘ontological equation’/or methods of estimating the odds to rise in the coming centuries by Kameelah Janan Rasheed is part of A Casual Mathematics, a series of interpretive art diagrams, which revisit W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconic data portraits in The Exhibit of American Negroes. This was a landmark exhibit within the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris that demonstrated the progress of Black Americans through the visual display of quantitative sociological information. Collectively, the series looks at how the language of statistics and demographic representation are used to narrate the story of both Black liberation, and struggle. According to the artist, “A Casual Mathematics is about the potentials and pitfalls of mathematical language to articulate a vast and non-centralized history (and future) of Black folks” and “the failure of all language to do work beyond approximations.”

This work was created in 2019, or the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the Virginia colony. During this alternative “birth year” (1619, not 1776) of the American project, Rasheed strikes a balance between two opposing records as the consequences of a nation imperilled by the legacy of slavery is set against Black contributions to that same society. This work asks us to take stock of these accounts by alluding to a poetic, if not cryptic, or even elusive hidden formula in which a peoples’ advancement can be calculated by solving for missing (perhaps past) variables.