Join us for Dr. Artel Great's final program as the Cultural Critic-in-Residence at MoAD!

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What happens when the Black radical imagination treats the screen as a laboratory for freedom? This program surveys a quarter-century of cultural flashpoints from Obama to Breonna Taylor, the rise and fall of DEI, to the decline of presidential politics, and the earthquake of George Floyd. “The Black Fantastic” examines these social and historical factors alongside a range of breakthrough films and television series that reshaped images of Black life on screen, from social horror and magical realism to superhero world-building and Afrofuturist speculation, Black creators have shattered expectations, redefined genres, and claimed narrative authority with exceptional force.

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Join Dr. Artel Great, MoAD’s Cultural Critic-in-Residence, as he maps a living constellation of moving image art that includes transformative works like Moonlight, Get Out, They Cloned Tyrone, The Book of Clarence, and landmark television like Insecure, Atlanta, Luke Cage, Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, Underground, and more. These works refuse easy categorization. They blend horror with social critique, speculative fiction with intimate character study, and comedy with existential dread.

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The centerpiece of our program will be anchored by Ryan Coogler's 2025 masterwork Sinners, a genre-defying film that synthesizes everything this era has to offer. Set in the 1932 Mississippi delta, Coogler's vampire opus marries Southern Gothic atmosphere with a blues ideology and the supernatural. Each of the works analyzed in “The Black Fantastic” share a common strand of DNA: they embrace genre as liberation, they insist that Black storytelling is universal, and that Black radical imagination is resistance, thriving in an unbound space where the future and the past collapse into a present that demands we see Black life in all of its beauty and complexity.

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This is a virtual event that will take place online. Attendees will receive private access to view Sinners on-demand prior to the program.

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