Wayne Hodge is an artist whose work combines elements of collage, performance, and photography. His practice explores the relationship between history, media, and fantasies of race and desire. His imagery is drawn from media, historical, and science fiction sources. He received an M.F.A. from Rutgers University and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School. His work has been shown at The Bronx Museum, MoMA P.S.1 and he has shown internationally in Germany, Brazil, and China. He was featured in ‘The Radical Presence’ at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Walker Arts Center, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Other exhibitions include ‘The Shadows Took Shape’ at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and “(an)other” at Practice
Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. In 2017, his solo project Skin Like Distant Stars was shown at Hallwalls in Buffalo, NY in 2017. Recent Exhibitions include Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism at the Oakland Museum of California, and Ascencion of Black Stillness CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

Wayne Hodge’s work combines historical and imaginative imagery to create new relationships and challenge notions of race, identity, and fantasy.  In his Android/Negroid series Hodge creates collages that combine science fiction machinery with historical images of African –American subjects.  In this project, he is creating re-imagined modernity.  The collages are inspired by historical images as well as early modern collages and photomontages. Hodge is interested in engaging how these forms develop historically and visually while interrogating the foundation of how we order contemporary visual and cultural language.  Within this order, he sees a conflict between fantasy and representations of a racialized other.

Hodge’s project is inspired in part by the collage work of Dada artists and the Surrealist visual novels of Max Ernst, Un Semaine De Bonté (A Week of Kindness), a work that takes its source material from 19th-century popular media, such as the penny dreadful and illustrated newspaper.

As Hodge’s practice is one that is fascinated by historical and outmoded forms of representation, he often re-interprets and recombines the obscure as a collection of histories, but these images point to a much different reality than the original sources. Much like the display case and the frame, the device through which they are seen is a sort of stage—a place where Hodge renders a world out of the various source material chosen. The images are informed by a history that points to an alternative future. Black astronauts and robots become fused in Science Fiction visualization that examines representations of race.