AGE: 31
BASED: New York/Columbus, Ohio
When we meet in early fall over Zoom, Cameron A. Granger stresses the collaboration at the heart of his multimedia practice. “Me and the homies, we’ve been making work for almost a decade together,” he says. The artist is fresh out of the inaugural In Situ Artist Fellowship at the Queens Museum of Art, which culminated in the solo exhibition “9999”—an experience he describes as “the most fun I’ve ever had making a show.” The resulting presentation is an exercise in world-building. Inspired by the role-playing video games he loves, Granger carefully weaves nostalgia and futurism, examining legacies of structural racism through themes of science fiction, spirituality, and cultural memory.
Granger was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, but spent most of his 20s in Columbus. Bad City, the fictional town at the heart of several of his short films, is “almost one-to-one with Columbus,” he says, but evokes any “post-industrial town with a Black community that’s been sucked dry by urban development.” The most recent addition to this collection is Here & there along the echo, a 27-minute pseudo-documentary about a neighborhood plagued by black holes that emerge like “wounds in space-time.” It’s clever, surreal, and experimental, bringing to mind triumphs like Random Acts of Flyness and NeonGenesis Evangelion.
“I think a lot about sampling music ... I think of it like a signal, kind of, to history, to communities. And I think of my own work—with my filmmaking, especially—as a sampling tactic, too,” he says. “I use a lot of songs or parts of songs that have certain histories attached to them. And I’m hoping that that’s a way of calling out to people that I want to engage with the work—and hopefully, they hear it.”
Before his time at the Queens Museum, Granger was a 2022 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and his short film Before I Let Go was awarded Best Experimental Film and an audience choice award at the 2023 BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia. Next up is a solo show at Kate Werble Gallery, opening in January 2025. He’s also working on a prospective addition to the Bad City universe and continuing to make zines, a longstanding part of his practice. His work is iterative, he tells me, growing out of previous editions, remixing and recalling the sights and sounds encountered along the way.
