Shannon Elyse Curry and Nneka Jones share an Afrofuturist 'View From Within' at Maitland Art Center gallery

It is impossible to overstate how different the world was in 1937 when André Smith created the Research Studio, now part of the Art and History Museums of Maitland. Knocking over the South's Jim Crow barriers and traditional male art-world barriers, Smith saw within the heart of the artist by collaborating with Zora Neale Hurston in nearby Eatonville, among many others. This view from within is the current exhibit's theme, bringing together Shannon Elyse Curry and Nneka Jones, two Black artists. These intensely talented young painters from Tampa share their own vigorous and colorful work, hinting at an Afrofuturist vision.

This exhibit was curated by the Links Foundation, a not-for-profit composed of African American professional women founded in 1946. Dan Hess, the Maitland Art and History curator, says, "It was an honor to work with this organization to bring their vision of these two artists to our gallery."

Curry and Jones bring rich experiences from their wide travels back to Florida. Curry, born in California, maintains her studio in South Tampa and paints from her experience as the daughter of a naval officer. "I moved 13 times before going off to college," she reveals in her artist's statement.

Her work focuses on a personal quest for beauty and joy, visible in "Self Portrait #3," a tightly cropped eyes-nose-lips portrait on a large canvas, where she built up deliciously complex layers of greens, soft reds, and ochres into skin tones rich with translucency and reflected light. The eyes glitter mystically as if fixed on something far in the distance.

Nneka Jones is originally from Port of Spain, Trinidad, and in her artist's statement she says she uses art as "a universal language that can connect people from many different cultures." With Trinidad's diversity, there's good precedent. Jones' unique process involves hand embroidery, laying basic color fields of acrylic onto a canvas to block out the composition and completing the work with colored threads. "Point of Intersection," a portrait she completed as a part of a series she calls Beyond the Horizon , is nearly all embroidery, with vermilion, aqua, charcoal and crimson threads softly texturing the face of the figure.

Lest one mistakes this for a show of pure portraiture, both artists work in abstraction as well. Jones' triptych of circular canvases integrate large, partially unzipped zippers revealing roundels of color as sort of targets for the viewer to contemplate. Curry's "Twilight" is a large abstraction uplifting her memories of sunsets, which she confessed were her touchstone throughout her multiple moves during childhood. Its gorgeous layers of sunset yellows and magentas fade into indigo and are dotted with black-and-white bubbles, making it read both as a panorama and a closeup at the same time.

Curry says, "There are viewers who want to see a specific concept presented by a Black female artist, preferably a concept highlighting struggle, pain, abuse, and marginalization." Although she and Jones both continue to experience these hardships, both also see them as only a component of who they are as artists. This is the Afrofuturist vision, where Black creators make Black stories independent of their relationship with other races. Seeing these works by emerging artists gives the viewer a glimpse of the exciting world of tomorrow, coming full circle from André Smith's original effort.