Sun Ra’s album cover Discipline 27-II and Ouattara Watts’s watercolor Wait Until Tomorrow both feature symbols of hands reaching up and outward, beyond the boundaries that seem to connect them. The eye-hand in Watts’s piece is a hamsa, a sign of protection in many faiths. Together with the arrows, which are on a curved upward trajectory, the hamsa suggests a connection to some of Sun Ra’s key goals: to create a new world, to reinvent the past to change the future, and to break out of the systematic and institutional oppression under which people of color live. Watts’s arrows and Ra’s music both point forward, asking us to accept the completeness of work that, like the struggle for freedom, is still unfinished.
—Miracle Freckleton ’20

From the exhibition: Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow (April 13 – April 16, 2017)