Building upon an ongoing dialogue between two artists of the African diaspora—Christopher Paul Jordan from the United States and Arnaldo James from Trinidad and Tobago—In the Interim is an offering to the Black community of the Seattle metropolitan area and of the wider diasporic world, as well as to the general public. Jordan and James’s collaborations are unified by a vision to create, exchange, witness, and support Black creative communities across the diaspora, in opposition to the colonialist structures dividing them.

Continuing this work, In the Interim is a speculative project dedicated to the production of Black public space, the preservation of Black oral tradition, and the facilitation of intergenerational dialogue among people of African descent. The exhibition centers on a soundproof recording booth called The Interim, which will be accessible only to self-identified Black individuals. Participants are invited to record their predictions and prophecies for the future, which will be compiled on a hard drive and stored in a time capsule. Envisioned as a metaphorical seed bank, the time capsule will be buried on the museum’s grounds and recovered one hundred years thereafter, the stories within made public at last. Reservations to make recordings in The Interim will be available on the Frye’s website in advance of the exhibition’s opening date.

The exhibition’s additional components are envisioned as a call and response between Jordan’s work, a new series of paintings on windows salvaged from historically Black neighborhoods in Tacoma, and James’s, a collection of photographs based on new interpretations of Carnival performance archetypes. Each body of work is singular and represents the cultural influences specific to each artist, but they are united by themes of inversion and immersion, as well as the shared desire to bridge the spatial and temporal distances of the diasporic world. James is also planning a performance following the Carnival tradition in his hometown of Port of Spain that will provide a ritual ground for the objects in the exhibition, including a ceremonial activation of the The Interim time capsule.

Conceived during the Black Lives Matter era but before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has wreaked further havoc on Black communities, In the Interim functions as a restorative proposition, at a time when identity politics, far from belonging in the past, need reimagining for and in the future.