The Hammonds House is celebrating local artist Steve R. Allen with two, count them, TWO exhibitions with an opening night reception on Friday, June 26th. The exhibition will run through August 23rd.

Entitled Infinite Inheritance: Afrofuturism, Sacred Geometry, and the Ancestral Imagination of Steve R. Allen and O Jogo Bonito (The Beautiful Game) Works by Steve R. Allen. I’m so excited, and I hope the community is as well.

I asked Allen how the idea of the two exhibitions came about, and he mentioned that the Hammonds House reached out to him. Known for his sports work, the timing of the FIFA World Cup comes together in the O Jogo Bonito exhibition. Allen’s work, Uniting Colors of the World, done for the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, measures almost 80 x 30 feet. Thirty years ago, Allen was commissioned to produce Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Games poster in 1996. I asked if Allen was an athlete as a young man and he shares that he is “the least” athletic man he knows.

The other exhibition, Infinite Inheritance: Afrofuturism, Sacred Geometry, and the Ancestral Imagination of Steve R. Allen, explores the geometric concept of fractals. Allen speaks about the five shapes that make up the components of all things. He speaks about the shapes forming patterns, and art is born.

Three years ago, at an exhibition in Brazil, Allen learned that the work is considered Afro-Futuristic. I asked if he had thought of this in creating, and it was the first time he’d learned of the genre. Allen gives us a personal invitation to the community to come out for the opening reception on Friday, June 26th, at the Hammonds House Museum in the Historic West End.