{"id":2232,"date":"2025-10-05T16:17:32","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T16:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/?p=2232"},"modified":"2025-10-05T20:29:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T20:29:45","slug":"supersouth-the-visual-frequencies-of-john-jennings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/2025\/10\/05\/supersouth-the-visual-frequencies-of-john-jennings\/","title":{"rendered":"SuperSouth: The Visual Frequencies of John Jennings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"SuperSouth: <\/strong><\/h2>\n

The Visual Frequencies of John Jennings<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

SuperSouth: The Visual Frequencies of John Jennings<\/em><\/strong> brings together two landmark exhibitions originally presented at Jackson State University<\/strong>\u2014Other Heroes: African American Comic Book Creators, Characters and Archetypes<\/em><\/strong> (2007) and Planet Deep South<\/em><\/strong> (2016)\u2014to explore the evolution of John Jennings\u2019s visionary practice across art, design, and speculative storytelling.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other Heroes<\/em> reimagined Black presence and power in the comic arts, reframing the superhero as a lens for understanding race, representation, and collective memory. This groundbreaking exhibition positioned comics and visual culture as spaces for cultural critique and creative resistance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nearly a decade later, Planet Deep South, <\/em>an exhibit and conference organized in collaboration with Dr. Rico Chapman and featuring work by Black Kirby, Jennings\u2019s long-running partnership with artist Stacey Robinson, expanded those ideas into the realm of Afrofuturism and digital worldbuilding. Conceived as part of a broader conference and creative research initiative, Planet Deep South<\/em> explored the intersections of technology, the Black South, and speculative imagination, positioning HBCUs as vital engines of future thinking and cultural production.<\/span><\/p>\n

SuperSouth<\/em> unites the critical and creative energies of these two exhibitions, tracing how Jennings\u2019s work transforms the gallery into a site of Black speculative thought. Through layered imagery, heroic archetypes, and remix aesthetics, Jennings and his collaborators re-envision the Deep South not as a static geography but as a living, cosmic terrain where history, technology, and imagination converge to chart new futures.<\/span><\/p>\n

About the Artist<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

\"In<\/p>\n

John Jennings is an award-winning artist, designer, curator, and scholar whose work spans comics, graphic novels, visual culture, and Afrofuturism. A Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, Jennings explores themes of identity, race, technology, and the Black speculative imagination.<\/span><\/p>\n

He is the co-founder of Black Kirby, a collaborative art duo with Stacey Robinson that reinterprets the work of comics legend Jack Kirby through an Afrofuturist lens. Jennings is also a co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identit<\/em><\/span>y in Comics and Sequential Art<\/em> and the artist behind graphic adaptations such as Kindred<\/em> by Octavia E. Butler.<\/span><\/p>\n

Through his art, writing, and curatorial practice, Jennings reimagines visual storytelling as a site of liberation, bridging the heroic, the historical, and the speculative to illuminate new Black futures.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SuperSouth: The Visual Frequencies of John Jennings SuperSouth: The Visual Frequencies of John Jennings brings together two landmark exhibitions originally presented at Jackson State University\u2014Other Heroes: African American Comic Book Creators, Characters and Archetypes (2007) and Planet Deep South (2016)\u2014to explore the evolution of John Jennings\u2019s visionary practice across art, design, and speculative storytelling. Other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":305,"featured_media":2233,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/305"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2232"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2250,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions\/2250"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsums.edu\/theartgallery\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}