Source: iOne Digital Creative Services
“Playing the Cosmic Strings,” a 1,200 square-foot mural, sits high on a wall outside of Heinz Hall in downtown Pittsburgh’s busy Cultural District. Commissioned in October 2021 by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, the mural is an homage to a West African mythology of how the universe began.
It is a shimmering constellation, a depiction of an androgynous or queer Black African divine being, and it tells a multilayered story of a cosmic spider whose web represents interlocking links of the universe, the strings of a child’s hand game, and the sacred energy that flows into everyday life and creation, including harmony and music (hence the symbolic attachment with the symphony).
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The art will remain up until fall 2026, giving thousands an introduction to an origin story from Africa and a glimpse of how the sacred echoes beyond colonial notions of divinity and the cisgendered figures of Adam and Eve.
Michael Owunna is a multimedia artist, engineer, and the author of the book Limitless Africans. | Source: Emmai Alaquiva
Conveying a broader notion of divinity is part of the goal for Rainbow Serpent, a four-year-old collective of Black LGBTQ artists and scholars who produced the mural.
Though based in Pittsburgh, the nonprofit has an international network, with people participating across the United States, England, and Nigeria.
It draws its name in part from the Pride flag, which represents the diverse LGBTQ community, and from the pantheon of African traditions, where the serpent is a common figure across cosmologies.
“Sharing African cosmology is the base of the work we do,” says co-founder Mikael Owunna, explaining that a key mission is to recover traditional African knowledge systems.
When these cultural and spiritual traditions are recovered, says Marques Redd, also a Rainbow Serpent co-founder, it instills pride and identity in the Black LGBTQ community. It also preserves cultural wisdom and challenges the dominant, monolithic stories that have marginalized or erased Black and LGBTQ people for centuries.
Dr. Marques Redd is an independent scholar, multimedia artist and traditional African cosmologist. | Source: Emmai Alaquiva
To aid in this recovery, the collective uses art, live performance, emerging technologies, and healing protocols to draw on and honor these narratives, practices, and wisdom from the past—a reach that propels its future.
A few years ago, a concert with the Pittsburgh Symphony drew 1,400 people, and a recent exhibit of 16 life-size sculptures at the Pittsburgh Glass Center drew more than 800 to the opening. Public artwork in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Tampa, and other cities has exposed millions to diverse African spiritual systems. Later this year, the collective plans to launch filmmaking projects, a writer’s retreat in Martha’s Vineyard, a mural in Pittsburgh dedicated to Martin Delany, the abolitionist and father of Black nationalism who lived in the city for more than two decades, and new programming in Brazil, Sweden, Scotland, and London.
And now, Rainbow Serpent will deepen its impact with a new residency for artist Dominique Swift, a Philadelphia native and University of Pittsburgh graduate who’s developing a series of 12 paintings inspired by Uli, a traditional art style by Igbo women in Southeastern Nigeria. The art, which typically is stained onto the body or painted onto buildings, reflects nature and the movement of celestial bodies.
Dominique Swift is in residency at Rainbow Serpent to work on a series of paintings entitled Uli Awakened. | Source: Dominique Swift
Swift’s project, “Uli Awakened: In Her Name,” draws from the Igbo tradition where a newborn receives a name on its 12th day of life. She says her 12 paintings will narrate “the journey of the first 12 days of life, the journey of the unfolding of the universe; and the journey of becoming an artist deeply connected to culture and history.”
She’s excited, she says, “to use Uli art to convey significant narratives about womanhood and the transmission of generational knowledge and … as a powerful means of preserving and communicating cultural heritage, values, and identity.”
All of the collective’s achievements are significant considering that they all flow from an initial meeting of two strangers in 2020.
A mutual friend introduced Owunna, a Pittsburgh native who was beginning to deepen his knowledge on African cosmology, to Redd, a graduate of Harvard who earned a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley and a recent transplant to Pittsburgh who had more than two decades of study on the subject. Connecting just before the pandemic, they continued their conversations on Zoom and launched a book group for Black LGBTQ people interested in African mythology with queer and androgynous themes. It soon grew, becoming a community.
The community’s growth was aided by the co-development of Obi Mbu (The Primordial House), a Rainbow Serpent film inspired by the group’s readings on West African Igbo cosmology, which is Owunna’s ethnic heritage. It describes two androgynous deities that create the entire universe through dance.
The film came out in 2021 and has toured more than 20 locations across the nation.
Michael Owunna’s “Playing the Cosmic Strings” mural was showcased on the side of Heinz Hall to celebrate the building’s 50th anniversary as the home of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. | Source: Rainbow Serpent
Along with its increasing artistic outreach, Redd also emphasizes that Rainbow Serpent’s work empowers the Black LGBTQ community by providing a platform for self-representation and raises awareness about the issues facing the community.
“In the context of rising anti-LGBTQ legislation and persistent racial discrimination, Rainbow Serpent’s work offers a counter-narrative that underscores the resilience, creativity, and contributions of Black LGBTQ individuals,” says Redd. “The educational components of our projects, such as the public conversations and workshops accompanying our artistic works, foster critical discourse and promote greater understanding.”
This visibility is a part of why Rainbow Serpent is an “institutional home” for many Black Queer creatives, says Owunna. It ignited an enthusiasm and a belonging, and creatives felt they didn’t need to leave Pittsburgh for other cities to find resources.
“We felt like we can build it here,” Owunna says, “and it can be really powerful.”
Owunna values the emerging community. A few years ago, he left his job in tech and used his passion for photography to explore LGBTQ African immigrant narratives. He traveled to 10 countries and photographed 50 LGBTQ African immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers producing a book that connected contemporary queer Africans to precolonial queer histories and identities.
A poster from the Rainbow Serpent film Obi Mbu (The Primordial House). | Source: Rainbow Serpent
“I learned about the sacred role that people who would now be identified as LGBTQ had within traditional African societies,” says Owunna. “They possessed energies both masculine and feminine and had special connection to the sacred. They were the diviners, the shamans, the mystics, and the healers of the community—the gatekeepers of the spirit world.”
Through his work, Owunna discovered an “underground network” of creatives and scholars all seeking to unlock pre-colonial identities that showcase a range of sexuality and gender identities on the African continent.
The discovery, he says, “sparked my entire journey as an artist and thinking about how I can use visual culture to share this information.”
Rainbow Serpent is important work, Owunna says. For him, it has “pulled back the veil on what it means to be African and showcases narratives that have been willfully suppressed.”
“By doing this research and creating a new archive of Black LGBTQ work, we are crafting a resource for the future,” he says. “I’m excited about the catalytic potential of queer African cosmologies to transform how we understand ourselves and the world.”
Ervin Dyer is a writer who focuses his storytelling on Africana life and culture.
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