Arnold Randall (b.1980, London, England) lives and works in Long Beach, California. Randall is an artist whose practice explores the intersection of Black identity, culture, and technology through a futuristic lens, while honoring a long lineage of innovation and creativity within the African diaspora.
His work envisions worlds where Black characters are not peripheral but central, occupying positions of freedom, resilience, and authority. Randall creates spaces where Black futures are expansive, unbroken, and infinite.
At its core, his practice challenges the absence of Black voices in narratives of power and possibility, offering instead images where presence, imagination, and self-determination define the future.
Statement:
I have been sketching fictional characters capable of traversing space and time, living within both utopian and dystopian storylines for as long as I can remember. As a child, I couldn’t really articulate the weight of those imaginings, but I understood the absence: people who looked like me were rarely present in futuristic narratives. That absence made invention necessary.
My earliest influences were comics my mother would buy me on weekends. I spent hours reading, tracing, and recreating the characters—mostly white—and redrawing them with features like mine. Over time, those childhood sketches evolved into worlds where Black characters stand as protagonists in advanced, techno-driven cultures & futures where we are central, and infinite.
My practice is devoted to building these alternative visions of the future. I create characters that embody resilience and possibility, drawn from the African diaspora, and place them in speculative worlds that challenge erasure and exclusion. I am not bound by linear storytelling or the demand for a singular theme; instead, I embrace multiplicity, letting each work stand as an imagining of what might be.
