Artists > Shonna Pryor, Of Portals and Pathways January 30 - February 28, 2022

Shonna Pryor, is a multimedia conceptual artist and Decision Cartographer whose work traces the hidden architecture of memory, power, and accountability. As an Afrofuturist artist in residence at The Chicago Council on Science and Technology, Pryor’s early practice — including Of Portals and Pathways — used reclaimed dinner tablecloths and speculative objects like the “Care Package for An Afro Migration To Mars” to open conceptual portals between the past, present, and future of diasporic African American culture.

That inquiry into what gets preserved, erased, and passed down led Pryor into the archive itself. In Of Portals and Pathways II: Fiscal Frontiers (Evanston Art Center, 2023), she worked with reproductions of defunct US government bank ledgers to recover individual histories buried inside institutional paperwork — asking who gets recorded, and who gets left out of the record.

That same question — who is accountable inside a system, and who gets to trace it — now drives Pryor’s current work as founder of Decision Cartography Consulting, where she maps the decision chains and authority transfers behind AI-driven institutional decisions. Her Forensic Map methodology is the natural extension of the archival and portal work that came before it: still tracing pathways, still asking who is responsible when a system — human or artificial — is followed.