Robert Pruitt was born in Houston, and is currently living and working in Chicago. He makes drawings and sculptures about the complexity of black identity, combining contrasting imagery from different black influences and aesthetics. He merges science fiction, hip hop, comic books, and black political and social struggles into layered portraits of his friends and neighbors. He has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Studio Museum Harlem, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and many other museums and spaces. He is also a founding member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones & Associates.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

RP: I grew up reading Marvel comics. I still read them off-and-on. I think my approach is completely formed by that. I like the superhero mythology and the melodrama of that form.

What went into the creation of your comic for this series? How did you select the imagery and text to work with? What story did you set out to tell, and how did this change as your comic developed?

RP: I was really excited when you contacted me about this project. It was a chance to retreat back to how I made art in High school. That's pretty much how I approached it. I just started drawing stuff that I liked to draw and think about. I made a few sketches of Robbie the Robot interacting with that Baga headdress character and everything just seemed to fall out of that. The text of the comic comes from Rap music verses. I wanted to tell this layered, obscured story that is sort of buried within the narrative of hip hop. Starting with Ice-T's opening line from "6 in the Mornin'," it kind of dances around this idea of confrontation with institutional power, and all the ebbs and flows of that type of struggle. I dug into my iTunes and pulled out all these great lines and tried to construct this story.

To some degree, the comic seems to deliberately problematize simple interpretation through it's fractured mash-up of various cultural references—from the mask-like appendages, to the iPhone, to contemporary fashion trends. In a way, this hybridization—which, one may argue, is the true power of hip hop culture—becomes an aesthetic in and of itself. Is this comic meant to speak to the difficulty of identifying a singular black aesthetic or linear cultural "narrative"?

RP: Yeah, I wanted the story to build up from a series of fragments of other stories. I'm interested in what that amalgamation looks and sounds like. I think it does mirror hop hop in that way, but it also mirrors American culture, and African American culture. In all my work I try to play around with a range of black cultural experiences. I'm dealing with how diverse and even fractured we are in terms of ideology and background, but yet still have these connecting threads of history and circumstance.

Throughout many of your works, there is a kind of temporal disjunction at work, where the past, present, and possible futures seem to collide and co-exist. Can you talk a little about the role that temporality and technology—and science fiction, for that matter—plays in this comic, and perhaps some of your other works?

RP: The figures in my drawings exist across time. I think this goes back to the earlier point of fragmented storytelling. The identities of these figures are constructed from fragments from all across time—past, present, and future. African Americans have a sort of rootless history—an elusive connection to our "Africanness," and a very strained sense of our "Americanness." We have always had to build and rebuild a workable sense of ourselves. It's a constant in our world-view: the need to go back in time, to find who we are. My drawings try to reflect that.

I think mainly in a resistant cultural stance. In my usual work and in this comic the characters I draw experiment with all types of dress and aesthetics. There is an interest in technology while still maintaining a sense of cultural solidarity.

You have said that your work "attempts to bridge the gap between African cultural traditions supposedly lost to African Americans, and contemporary art making tactics." The tension of this gap can certainly be felt in your work, and within the art world in general, which tends to have a strongly Western bias in the types of cultural production that it includes and excludes. Can you elaborate on this point and how it relates to your own experience as an artist? Do you see yourself as a mediator between these two cultural discourses?

RP: I think that is something I wrote a few years back. I don't know that I would phrase it the same way today but I do think the core issue is the same. It's that distance between marginal spaces and that of official institutional spaces—how all of us, our identities and histories, are constructed by that institutional space in ways that reaffirm an imbalanced power structure. I try to make images that work in that same institutional way but prop up that marginalized identity.

What are the issues facing us today that you're most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

RP: The Hadron Collider.