Real Time and Space is ecstatic to host REAL TALKS with resident artist Aisha Shillingford and our special guest, Kristen Zimmerman. Get here early for pizza on Thursday, May 29th from 6-8pm at RTS located at 125 10th St. Oakland.
Aisha Shillingford builds more beautiful worlds in public. She is a collagist, street artist and world builder originally from Trinidad & Tobago. She is the Artistic Director of Intelligent Mischief, a creative studio unleashing the power of Black radical imagination to shape the future. She is a former Fellow and Artist In Residence (Create Change Fellow ‘20 and AiR ‘23) at the Laundromat Project, former mentor at the New Museum Incubator (New Inc.), and a former Project Fellow at NYU ITP. Her work has been commissioned by the Anchorage Museum, Earthseed, Good Mirrors, Collective Acceleration, Borders Like Water, Movement for Black Lives, Root Rise Pollinate and Creative Wild Fire and licensed by Nonprofit Quarterly, marginalia, Leadership Learning Community, Cooper Hewitt, and the Center for Third World Organizing. Her work with Intelligent Mischief has been included in Occupancies @ Boston University Art Galleries (2017); Who Owns Black Art (Zeal Coop, 2019); How To Survive @ Anchorage Museum (2024); Witness @ Photoville (Good Mirrors, 2024), and Alhamdu: Muslim Futurism @ Colorado College Fine Arts Center (2024-3925). With Intelligent Mischief she has co-created experiential futurist installations at Carnegie Hall, Tone Gallery in Memphis, TN and Nation X, a virtual 24 hour rave all based on collectively imagined future worlds in which Black people are thriving, sovereign, and free. She crafts IMaginals, meditative world building experiences to guide individuals and groups in creating visceral, palpable, irresistible visions of more beautiful futures through rest, dreaming, and bold imagination.
Kristen is a multidisciplinary artist, storyteller, world-builder and way-finder based in Oakland, CA. Her comics and stories weave magic, memory & nonfiction to repair intergenerational trauma, reconnect us to ancestral wisdom, and open new possibilities for the future. Her people are the ones who live in the in-between spaces and generate hope. Kristen is on faculty at California State University, East Bay, where she teaches illustration and comics. She holds an MFA in Comics from the California College of Art and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University. Her first graphic novel, Ten Thousand Beloved Communities, was released in 2024. She is currently working on two graphic memoir projects about chosen family, Starting Route to Home and the Hawai’i Blue Ink series. Some of her happy places are hanging out with her modern queer family, training in zen, spending time in nature and making really good food with friends.