Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art

Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art is a pioneering exhibition by The Kitchen, taking place in two parts: first at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture from October 15 to December 19, 2024, and then at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit from April 25 to September 7, 2025. This exhibition centers and celebrates contributions by artists of African descent to the rapidly advancing field of new media art and digital practice, while exploring the relationship between Black cultural production and the legacy of computation as a mode of machinic engagement and creative inspiration.

 

Lorraine O'Grady will be exhibiting her work, in the first part of the exhibition at the Schomburg, alongside other key visual artists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Tom Lloyd, David Drake, Benjamin Patterson, Howardena Pindell, George Lewis, Candis Mosely Pettway, Mattie Ross, Ulysses Jenkins, Milford Graves, Faith Ringgold, Blondell Cummings, as well as influential thinkers like Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Marion Stokes. Together, these creative practitioners via their artistic innovations establish new sightlines to a Black networked life, an empowered avant-garde algorithm that predates and extends beyond the invention of the Internet.