The Queens Museum is pleased to present Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data, organized by Stamps Gallery, University of Michigan. This is the first survey of the renowned transmedia artist, who creates platforms for dialogue about artificial intelligence as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Dinkins’ practice encourages action towards making artificial intelligence systems more inclusive and transparent via art production and exhibition, community-based workshops, and public speaking.

This exhibition debuts three new works that build on her manifesto Afro-now-ism published in June 2020. They are: Binary Calculations Are Inadequate to Assess Us (2021), an interactive installation, workshop and app that asks how can make the technological systems that control our relationships, governments, and institutions more caring; a neon sculpture that spells out the word “Afro-now-ism” in a font that references sci-fi narrative aesthetics, and techno beats; and #Say It Aloud (2021) an interactive webXR experience where the central character – Afro-now-ist Professor Commander Justice advocates all people, particularly from communities of color, to confront and rise above institutional and social constructions of race, caste, and class, and the litany of violence that humans have wielded upon one another. Professor Justices urges public audiences to start building the world that they desire, they ask, “The question is not only what injustices are you fighting against, but what do you in your heart of hearts want to create in this world?”

These installations will be paired with renowned and critically acclaimed works such as Dinkins’ interactive video installation, Secret Garden (2020), which for this iteration is site-specifically reconfigured to be presented alongside the Museum’s The Panorama of the City of New York. Altogether, the exhibition cultivates insightful dialogues with the audience on the hierarchies embedded within machine learning and AI architecture and one’s individual agency in transforming the algorithms within it. The audience will explore and participate in creating a more inclusive data-based narrative of what governance of the people, by the people and for the people can look like in an AI mediated world where care is encoded within our digital civic system.

On Love and Data originated at the Stamps Gallery, University of Michigan and is curated by Srimoyee Mitra, Director, Stamps Gallery and generously funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts.

The New York presentation is organized by Sophia Marisa Lucas, Adjunct Curator, Queens Museum.

Stephanie Dinkins (b.1964) is a transmedia artist who creates platforms for dialogue about race, gender, aging and our future histories. Dinkins’ art practice employs emerging technologies, documentary practices and social collaboration toward equity and community sovereignty. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded in social and technological ecosystems. Dinkins is a professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Professor in Art. Dinkins earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Studies Program. She exhibits and publicly advocates for inclusive AI internationally at a broad spectrum of community, private and institutional venues. Dinkins is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow and Knight Arts & Tech Fellow. Previous fellowships, residencies and support include the Artist Fellow of the Berggruen Institute and Lucas Artists Fellow in Visual Arts at Montalvo Art Center, CA Onassis Foundation, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Creative Capital, Soros Equality Fellowship, Data and Society Research Institute Fellowship, Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works Tech Lab, NEW INC, Blue Mountain Center; The Laundromat Project, Santa Fe Art Institute and Art/ Omi. The New York Times featured Dinkins in its pages as an AI Influencer. Wired, Art in America, Artsy, Art21, Hyperallergic, the BBC, Wilson Quarterly, and a host of popular podcasts have recently highlighted Dinkins’ art and ideas.