Ajamu Kojo trained as a filmmaker, graduating from Howard University’s storied program, and developed his studio practice as a painter while pursuing a professional career as a scenic artist in the film & television industry. This background feels significant to the paintings that have emerged in the last few years. His recent body of work displays an attention to the past enlivened by a vision that is cinematic in scope, creating a kind of painted moving picture. This power is evidenced in the celebrated series “Black Wall Street,” a series of portraits that seems descended from the tradition of history painting – the genre itself was something like the cinema of its time. Upon painstakingly prepared canvases, Ajamu collapses past and present, and through these invites viewers to witness an embodied futurity, in which the easy smiles and tender proximity of his sitters – stand ins for survivors of the Greenwood massacre – render wholeness and persistence to what has been lost. The affective claim of these paintings proposes that a destroyed future is still in reach, despite the specter of destruction and oblivion seeping from beyond the frame, figured by the drip of black paint.