A Thousand Answers: Rhizome Fellowship Artists 2025/26

October 1 – 25, 2026
Flux IV, 56-21 2nd Street
Opening Reception: October 1, 6:00 – 9:00 pm with remarks at 7:00 pm
Open: Friday – Sunday, 2:00 – 6:00 pm or by appointment

Events
Soil and Sand: A Sonic Journey with Kino Benally, Tati Benally, and dre jácome: October 13, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Noticing Zine Activation: October 25, 2:00 – 4:00 pm

Flux Factory is pleased to present A Thousand Answers: Rhizome Fellowship Artists 2025/26, featuring works by dre jácome and Zella. Last year, Flux Factory’s 2025/26 Rhizome Fellowship open call received over 70 proposals resonating with Octavia Butler’s essay, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” juried by artists Kamari Carter, Utsa Hazarika, and Flux’s Curator & Exhibitions Director, Meghana Karnik. 

The exhibition’s title, A Thousand Answers, stems from the interview that prompted Butler’s essay, in which she explained that the problems of the future have no single solution, but “thousands of answers.” Selected for their respective track records in convening spaces for critical memory work and knowledge production, and for the value they place on collective intelligence, each fellow has brought distinct practices of gathering, worldbuilding, and the pluriversal into their 18-month fellowship period.

jácome presents Earthseed (2022—present), a site-specific storytelling installation that houses and encodes oral history interviews onto seed sculptures. Inspired by Octavia Butler, temazcal ceremony, and the everyday knowledge held in the land and its stewards, this iteration is rooted in a collaboration with Ayni Herb Farm and its founder Amara Ullauri. While many tech and artist practices work with the metaphor of the land, this project turns toward those whose hands tend it. Taking cues from ecological information architecture, the installation speculates on what it looks like to house living archives off screen and in relationship. At a moment when technology and knowledge production are often engineered to extract and make noise, this is an invitation to listen to the land as a teacher, in times of change and climate grief.

Zella contributes an intermedia installation and library, situated in the ephemeral practices and visual artifacts of Experimental School for Black Imagination, a collective (initiated by Zella and troizel) that tends to the ways artists gather, feel, and create. Experimental’s zine publication series, We Be Coming Free, formerly titled The Nigga Way, is a nod to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Each zine is developed communally, through integrated workshops drawing on Black imagination, somatic wisdom, and contemporary critical thought. A new volume of We Be Coming Free, “Noticing,” will be released on the occasion of A Thousand Answers; bringing together personal essays, collage, text excerpts, curated images, and open-call submissions, to create a space for witnessing and attentional resources. “Noticing” considers the ways collective practices of attention can become forms of creative sovereignty—ways of making and sharing knowledge that extend across and beyond the structures of imperial power. Zella invites artists and culture workers to consider the possibilities of practicing together: ephemeral, illegible, elsewhere, and among our peoples.

The 2025/26 Rhizome Fellowship offered the artists dedicated time and support to develop their practices within Flux’s community, through curatorial mentorship and engagement with Flux staff, guest advisors, and neighborhood partners to expand their project proposals towards a public presentation at Flux IV. Across the 18-month fellowship period, the artists were invited to pursue initial research questions and build new forms of exchange, culminating in A Thousand Answers. The exhibition embraces Butler’s proposition that we can each be an answer to future challenges, if we so choose.

About the Artists

dre r. jácome is an andean-american transdisciplinary artist, storyteller, and strategist inspired by magical realism and the survival arts of everyday living. Drawing from her studies in history, herbalism, and interactive technology, she weaves across digital and land-based technologies to honor and defend BIPOC knowledge systems held in story, nature, and recovering cosmologies. Her practice is grounded in relational methodologies—archival research, oral history, critical ethnobotany, and long-term partnership with organizations and chosen family—and indebted to years of working alongside solidarity economy, abolition, and popular education movements across Philly, NYC, and Bogotá. Currently, she serves as the communications director at the After Violence Project.

Zella is an artist, cultural organizer, and designer whose work spans painting, performance, zines, and portal-making; and a founding organizer with the Experimental School for Black Imagination, a collective offering led by artists tending to the ways we come together to create, feel, and grow. Zella’s work aims to ask new questions about what it means to be free, while being a mirror for Black queer folks; visualizing our beauty, divinity, and boundless new worlds that have always been ours to take up spiritual residence in. Zella earned an MFA in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts; and they split their time between New York City and Côte d’Ivoire. They are also a board member and design lead with the Black Veterans Project. They live in Brooklyn with their turtle, MJ.

About Rhizome Fellowships

Rhizome Fellowships make time and space to forge stronger ties between Flux’s collective network and community-based practice engaging under-heard, under-seen, and under-supported voices in Queens. 2025/26 was the inaugural year of the fellowship. The fellowships are a residency and exhibition opportunity, iterating on The Rhizome Project, initiated by Haiba Hamilton and Natalia Nakazawa in 2020.

Media & Visitor Contact

Meghana Karnik, Curator & Exhibitions Director
meghana@fluxfactory.org

Accessibility

Flux IV is located on the ground floor of 56-21 2nd Street, Long Island City, NY 11101 between the Queens Landing Boathouse & Environmental Center and Gotham Point apartments. The closest bus stop is 2 St/55 Ave on the Q101. The closest subway station is Vernon Blvd-Jackson Ave on the 7 line (purple) and 21st st G line (green). The closest ferry pier is Hunter’s Point South Ferry Landing. A Citibike station is located at Center Blvd & Hunters Point South Ferry Landing. iPark (paid parking) is available on 1-20 56th Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101. There is a public restroom left of our front door.