From Land to Cosmos: Turiya Adkins on Flight
Installation view of Turiya Adkins’s work at the Independent Art Fair 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Hannah Traore Gallery. Photo by Evan McKnight.
“I think research for me is a big refuge from feelings of anxiety and fear for the future,” says artist Turiya Adkins when asked how she is responding to the ongoing erasure of Black history and the political currents reshaping how human rights discourses exist within public institutions. “Just maintaining the kind of ferocity that I approach my practice with is kind of my form of resistance.”
Indeed, the spirit of Turiya Adkins’s multimedia work is perfectly captured by the word “ferocity.” Bridging painting with collage, the artist represents, archives, and immortalizes the resistance and achievements of Black communities, expanding on the legacies of the Great Migration, Black athletes in track and field, the Tuskegee Airmen, James Meredith’s 1966 March Against Fear, among others. While frequently making specific references to historical figures and events, Adkins does not necessarily create work to reiterate these themes in a didactic or chronological manner. Instead, her work contains a kind of awe and care, pointing to an interest in building a relationship with the past and connecting the dots within non-linear time. She explains, “My work is a representation of the uncapturable—things that refuse to fully be known. That allows me to bring forth, or create, new identities.” Amid nebulous contours of pastel colors, archival photographs, and gestural, smudged paint, Adkins deploys a visual language of concision and clarity while meaning remains multivalent and just beyond reach.
Turiya Adkins, Bible of The Sport (2025). Courtesy of the artist and Hannah Traore Gallery.
In a way, Adkins notes, her work has shifted its focus from “history to mystery, time to space.” On her website, Adkins describes her practice as concerned with “Black bodily motion, specifically through modes of flight.” And flight, in her hands, is not just physical. It is futuristic, metaphoric, visionary, and one might even say, mythic. Gazing skyward, she has recently started thinking about the outer space and researching the Zambian Space Program, citing the film Afronauts (2014), legendary jazz musician Sun Ra, and his concept of Afro-Black mythology as sources of inspiration: “Sun Ra’s use of outer space as a metaphor for inner space—meaning imagination or the psyche of a person—has been a big point of departure for my work recently.” The increasingly transcendent line of inquiry extends from “longitudinal movements—on land—to latitudinal ones—into space.” Adkins calls this evolving concern a shift in “relativity to the land,” a spatial metaphor for Black liberation movements that have always been tied to territory.
Previously, her research in flight focused on myths of the past, for instance, the legend of the Flying Africans—the belief that enslaved people could escape their bondage by flying over the Atlantic Ocean and back to Africa. With that exploration came material investigations of salt and corn cobs, as it was believed that consuming too much salt would hinder one’s ability to fly, whereas putting corn cobs underneath one’s armpits could induce flight. In our conversation, Adkins also evokes the history of Igbo Landing, where in 1803, captive Igbo people who refused to submit to slavery in the US took control of the ship they were on and committed mass suicide in a spirit of resistance by walking into the Dunbar Creek. From tracking bodies on Earth to contemplating their liberation beyond it, bodies and how they strive to exist beyond physical, physiological, and social confines remain central to Adkins’s work: “I think about the pressure we put on our bodies in this atmosphere,” she says. “So what does it mean to defy that?”
Turiya Adkins, Afronaut (2025). Courtesy of the artist and Hannah Traore Gallery.
Despite the expansiveness of her ideas, Adkins’s work is rooted in process, and her research spans scholarly sources and vernacular culture alike—JSTOR articles, interviews, lyrics, and poetry. About these varied sources, she says, “There’s less discrepancy than you’d think. A line in an Earl Sweatshirt song might align with Sun Ra’s thinking on cosmic salvation.”
When asked if her work is political, the artist responds, “Yes. It’s not that I’m making work specifically about the ongoing wars or the tariffs, but the present climate ignites these little niches of research I find myself drawn to . . . The accumulation of all our art is, inevitably, political—it reflects the times.” At a time of political uncertainty when the risk of censorship and erasure looms over many’s creative practices, Adkins feels a sense of sustained productivity and calm through her practice committed to history, myth, and remembering: “What’s more important is my ability to manifest these visions for myself. These paintings are my attempt to bring form to future myths and ultimately, to the uncapturable.”
Installation view of Turiya Adkins’s work at the Independent Art Fair 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Hannah Traore Gallery. Photo by Evan McKnight.
Turiya Adkins: Weightlessness Training was presented by Hannah Traore Gallery at the Independent Art Fair from May 8th to May 11th, 2025.
