eARThseed: How Octavia Butler’s Work Inspires the Arts

Join us for a conversation about the ways Octavia Butler's works inspire the arts, with visual artist Aramis Hamer and photographer and filmmaker Berette Macaulay, moderated by Brooke Bosley.  

This program is part of Seattle Reads “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler. It is presented in partnership with ARTE NOIR and The Seattle Public Library.

Aramis Hamer is a splash, acrylic painter and muralist who loves making a mess. As an emerging artist, Hamer spends the majority of her days in the studio creating the colorful images that are slowly becoming her signature style. The basic themes found in her work are strong color contrasts, exaggerated subject matter, and drip techniques where she stretches the boundaries of surreal, pop, and abstract art. Integrating imagery of strong sensual goddesses and cosmic landscapes reflects Aramis’s admiration for the divine feminine. Music is one of her main inspirations. Songs are like stories that continue to inspire all of her work. Hamer’s acrylic paintings are inspired by divine femininity, music, higher consciousness, and the cosmos. Liberation is her life’s work–to free herself from the chains that could hold her back mentally, physically, and spiritually. Aramis’s paintbrush reminds her of the creative power she has within the canvas–and life. As she takes this journey to freedom, she hopes to inspire others along the way. Learn more at www.aohamer.com

Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary visual artist with training background in dance and theatre performance.  Her creative and cultural practices take on discursive explorations in photography, mixed media, curatorial + collaborative art organizing, and writing.  She identifies as an Afro-Caribbean Creole woman of multi-im/migrant routes, born in Freetown, Sierra Leone  and currently based in Washington State, USA. Her cultural heritages guide her examinations of be/longing and exile, trans*national personhood, love, memory, and familial mythologies.  Berette exhibits and publishes nationally and internationally, with works acquired by National Gallery of Jamaica and International Center of Photography (as ‘SeBiArt’).    Berette was a recipient of the UW Ottenberg-Winans Fellowship for African Studies for Embodied Witness - her ongoing research on diasporic Afro-gestural vocabularies. An essay reprisal of this research was recently included in the O Quilombismo Reader, engaging Abdias Nasciemento’s global social justice foundations published by Archive Books/Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin.  Her local curatorial work includes MFON in Seattle, a series of exhibitions with MFON Women, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Frye Art Museum, and Photographic Center NW. As the inaugural Curatorial Fellow with On the Boards, she recently presented a collaborative immersive and site-specific theatre project “UN-[TITLED]”, addressing urban development/displacement histories and community resistance stories in Seattle’s Central and Int’l Chinatown Districts. She is currently the Guest Curator for the Artist Legacy Residency program at Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and the founder and lead organizer for Black Cinema Collective (BCC) which celebrates African and Afro-Diasporic films, which is a project of her collaborative arts incubator, i•ma•gine | e•volve. Learn more at www.berettemacaulay.com

Brooke Bosley is a design researcher in education technology.She holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media, specializing in Black Media, from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Bosley’s dissertation focused on Afrofuturist Feminism Design Principles, which focused on the intersections of Human-Computer Interaction, Afrofuturism, Black Feminism, and Race and Technology.  Brooke holds an MS in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a BA in Integrated Digital Media (a self-design interdisciplinary degree) with minors in communications and mathematics from Wesleyan College (in Macon, Georgia). She has taught workshops on robotics, technology, and Afrofuturism for elementary to High school students. In her free time, Brooke enjoys embroidery, reading, and exploring different Seattle neighborhoods. Brooke also hosts a monthly Black Futures book club at the Loving Room Book Store in Seattle's Central District.