About the program
Blanc Gallery presents code: KING ALFRED, a conceptual exploration of “The King Alfred Plan” by Chicago-based artist Andres L. Hernandez. Introduced in John A. Williams’s 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, “The King Alfred Plan” details a fictional U.S. government plot to quell Black rebellion.
Through a creative (re)imagining of a fictional work with increasingly real-world implications, Hernandez considers histories of Black urban uprising from the 1960s to the present, alongside historical and contemporary attempts to undermine and eliminate dissent in the U.S.
Initially trained as an architect, Hernandez works at the intersection of the social and the spatial. He considers the symbiotic, yet, fraught relationships of built and natural environments and their inhabitants, and speculates alternative pasts, presents, and futures for all.