Elastic Arts

This Thursday French flutist / electronics musician Calamity and Chicago drummer and composer Tim Daisy will present a set of duo improvisations. This marks their first live duo performance in the United States.

Acorn Projects is an ongoing collaboration between string players Ilana Waniuk (Los Angeles), Myra Hinrichs (Los Angeles), Dan Galat (Chicago), and Kelly Quesada (Chicago). They function as an interdisciplinary quartet of equals, questioning and reimagining relationships between the individual, the environment, and the binaries we collectively imagine as constructing the world around us. Join us Thursday at 8:30pm!

8:30 pm: Acorn Projects
9:30 pm: Calamity + Tim Daisy Duo

TODAY!!

Join us as we close out AfroFuturist Weekend 11 at Blanc Gallery in Bronzeville with a collaborative presentation featuring Elastic Arts’ AfriClassical Futures series. The program will highlight Autophysiopsychic Millennium’s White Flowers, a string ensemble that emerged from the organization’s theatrical production Something Else in the Garden. That performance was inspired by Dr. Yusef Lateef’s novella, Night in the Garden of Love, connecting the festival’s exploration of “The Cipher” to Lateef’s expansive legacy as a musician, composer, educator, and visionary thinker.

Producer, flutist & multiinstrumentalist BSA Gold will begin the afternoon with a trio performance. We’ll start gathering at 3pm with performances at 4pm.

All attendees are encouraged to spend time experiencing the Blanc Gallery’s exhibits, which intersect with AfroFuturist Weekend’s mission to envision radically positive and liberated futures for Black people, especially the radical Oscar Brown Jr. centennial exhibit.

Offsite at Bronzeville’s Blanc Gallery [outdoors, weather permitting]. 4445 S King Drive

On Saturday AfroFuturist Weekend 2026 comes back to its home base Elastic Arts for an evening celebrating hip hop’s history and future. The evening will flow naturally with a few brief breaks, so come and go as you please between 5 PM and “late,” as set times are approximate.

At 5pm 2026 Dark Matter Resident Aquil “AQ” Charlton will lead a panel of voices in hip hop, Lyrical Miracles: Rap Artists & the Craft, and Culture,” a discussion of hip-hop, lyricism featuring PsalmOne, green Slime, Asha Omega and J Bambii remotely from the UK. Lyrical Miracles is a discussion about the genius of rap and the rappers who create it. Rap is widely considered one of the densest and most complex forms of songwriting, yet it is often diminished as a singular form associated with its most superficial commercial practitioners. This discussion among rappers acclaimed for their lyricism will examine the current value of lyrical craft among practitioners, audiences, and the music industry.

After the panel, Dark Matter Resident Amari Amai presents “de/cipher” an immersive sound experience featuring music and storytelling using Elastic Arts’ 16-channel CLEAT sound system.

At 9pm reedist and composer Mike Monford & The Afrofuturistic Vibe will perform. Monford will pay tribute to his childhood friend and colleague J Dillaand present 4 new compositions in his honor. There will also be a new composition from his next album entitled Night Blooming Cereus. Get ready for a blend of the African Diaspora, JDilla and Monford style with a large ensemble!

Mike Monford & Afrofuturistic Vibe

Mike Monford: Alto Saxophone & Vocals
Corey Wilkes: Trumpet
Louis M Jones III: Drums
Josef Deas: Bass
Tara Shaheer Monford: Spoken Word
Ytasha Womack: Spoken Word
Lufuki Ismaeel Dhul-Qarnayn: Guitar

Afrofuturistic Strings

Laina Martin: Violin
Indira Edwards : Viola
Brendan Callies : Cello

Let's close AfroFuturist Weekend XI together with our AfriClassical Futures team at Blanc Gallery in Bronzeville -- Sunday 10/4 3PM

AFRICLASSICAL FUTURES PRESENTS: WHITE FLOWERS (DETROIT), BSA GOLD @ BLANC Elastic Arts/Africlassical Presents: "White Flowers" (Detroit), BSA Gold at Blanc Gallery to close out Afrofuturist Weekend 2026

Join us on Saturday afternoon for an AfroFuturist Weekend staged reading at La Escuelita Bombera de Corazón / 3505 West North Avenue in Humboldt Park. ‘Black Warrior Angel’ intends to be another loving guide to Africa’s global descendants in a quest for answers. This theatrical work-in-progress is written by Xavi Burgos, a 2026 Dark Matter Resident. This is the first in a two-part reading, as part of a series of new art works titled A New History of the Puerto Rican Peoples, told in poetry, play, song, fabric, painting, performance, music, dance, ritual, and revolution.

Who exactly will we become?

Offsite in Humboldt Park at La Escuelita Bombera de Corazón
3505 W. North Ave.

FREE AT DOOR AS CAPACITY ALLOWS

AfroFuturist Weekend XI continues off-site Friday night in Bronzeville at a beautiful church @ 4622 S. King Drive. We’ll start with solo performances from 2026 Dark Matter Residents Nova Zaii and nxtlvl (udochukwu anidobu). The evening will culminate in a full night of dancing featuring most excellent selectors DJ Duane Powell, CTRL Zora, and Harlem West. 

Offsite in Bronzeville at 4622 S. King Dr

FREE AT DOOR AS CAPACITY ALLOWS - RSVP IN BIO

IT’S AFROFUTURIST WEEKEND WEEK! We can’t wait to see you Thursday-Sunday for our biggest festival yet. What’s most special about AFW XI is that we’ll be popping up with events throughout the city. Join our 2026-2027 Dark Matter Residents at The.BlkRoom for the kickoff to AFW XI this Thursday. We’ll have a panel and performance on ‘What’s In The Cipher?’ moderated by author Ytasha Womack. She will be signing her new books ‘The Afrofuturist Evolution: Creative Paths to Self-Discovery’ and ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales.’ The evening will introduce audiences to new work developed through the residency while celebrating the creativity and experimentation at the heart of the Dark Matter program.

We’ll get started shortly after 6pm Offsite at The.BlkRoom [4015 W. Carroll Ave, Unit 204]

FREE AT THE DOOR, OR RSVP LINK IN BIO

Mike Monford ensemble tribute to J. Dilla at Elastic Arts! Saturday Oct. 3rd! RSVP today!

AFW 2026: Mike Monford (Detroit) J Dilla Tribute; Hip Hop Panel & Film Come for a hip hop panel curated by AQ Charlton at 5. Stay for Mike Monford's live original tribute to legendary producer J Dilla (9 PM)

TONIGHT!

We’ll see you this evening when we welcome TROMPE, an improvising music trio from the east coast featuring Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet), Jeff Song (cello) and Daniel Lin (cello). For this concert they will be joined by special guests Michael Zerang (drums, percussion) and Jeb Bishop (trombone).

Percussionist Tyler Tadlock first joins us from Jackson, Mississippi in an ad-hoc group with Jeb Bishop and Christopher Riggs to open the night.

8:30pm:
Tyler Tadlock - drums set, percussion
Jeb Bishop - trombone
Christopher Riggs - guitar

9:30pm: TROMPE
Taylor Ho Bynum - cornet
Jeff Song - cello
Daniel Lin - cello

W/ Michael Zerang - drums, percussion
Jeb Bishop - trombone

Join us Saturday evening for the closing concert of the AMPLIFY! Festival of Asian American Music: Sound and Scholarship, opening with ghOstMiSt’s Ayam who you say Ayam. ghOstMiSt is a Balinese experimental duo consisting of Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena and Dewa Ayu Eka Putri who enact performative inquiries of Balinese-ness and question spiritual and cosmological epistemologies of performance.

To close the concert, Juan Flores, gordon fung, Peixuan Ouyang, Kyle Price, and Sharkey Zalek will present the state of (un)becoming. This improvisatory collaboration between sound, butoh, movement, and expanded cinema presents a real-time metamorphosis of undulating materials. Through an unconventional combination of diverse multimedia idioms, the quintet co-composes a dreamy and meditative state that arises and dissipates simultaneously and spontaneously, guiding audiences into an introspective journey.

The concert will also feature performances of two major works in the contemporary Western classical music tradition. Naomi Niskala and An-Lin Bardin will perform Michi Wiancko’s HOME (2024) for piano, cello and electronics, and Koeun Grace Lee performing Texu Kim’s piano work Co.Ko. – un poco Loco (2017).