Drawing imagery from science fiction, comic books, hip hop culture, and images taken from the history of political and social struggle in the United States, Robert Pruitt creates drawings, paintings, and sculptures that explore the complexities at the center of contemporary black identity. In his sculpture he works in a more conceptual mode, using found objects such as syrup bottles, shoe laces, and bubble gum. He often paints portraits of his friends and family dressed in period costume and with props, creating amalgams of different black historical figures, romantic visions of precolonial Africa, and fantasy. Humorous and incisive, Pruitt’s contemporary myth-making allows him to place the everyday within a broader narrative of black cultural self-realization.