Banal Presents was the third and final chapter in the exhibition series Colored People Time and staged a conversation between the artists Carolyn Lazard, Cameron Rowland, and Sable Elyse Smith. The artists in this exhibition — and we, as viewers — occupied a current moment haunted by what the Professor Saidiya Hartman has termed the “afterlife” of slavery. This “afterlife” names the enduring presence of slavery’s racialized violence that permeates every aspect of our society. Banal Presents locates the present as the space where we bend the relationship between the past and the future. The present, in all of its fleetingness, is where we act.

Colored People Time, structured as an experimental exhibition in three chapters — Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, and Banal Presents — unfolded over the course of 2019.