Marques Redd: African Cosmologist & Multimedia Artist
Dr. Marques Redd is a traditional African cosmologist, independent scholar, multimedia artist, and Co-Founder of Rainbow Serpent, a Black LGBTQ art | tech | spirituality organization. His work reclaims, reinterprets, and extends indigenous African knowledge systems – particularly from Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) and West African (Yoruba, Dogon, Dagara, and Igbo) contexts – through sculpture, film, performance, immersive media, photography, writing, light installation, music, and healing retreats.
Redd’s recent body of work centers on Myth-Science of the Gatekeepers (2024), a series of sixteen glass sculptures depicting Black queer Kemetic deities. The project has generated an expanding constellation of works, including Blackstar Sanctuary (2024), an immersive virtual reality temple experience; Opening the Mouth (2024), a site-specific dance performance inspired by the ritual of the same name; Knowing the Evolutions of Ra (2024), a musical retelling of a Kemetic creation narrative; X (Nu/Apuat/Geb) (2025), a photographic portrait extending cosmology into lens-based practice; This Is The Body Of The Sun (2026), an eight-foot cast aluminum sculpture of the solar deity Ra; and May We See Thy Beauties (forthcoming), a performance film created in collaboration with the Sun Ra Arkestra and Sidra Bell Dance New York.
His earlier projects include Obi Mbu (The Primordial House) (2021), a dance film and photography series exploring an Igbo creation narrative; The Four World Ages (2023), a multimedia performance and public art project examining cyclical theories of human history; Playing the Cosmic Strings (2021), a collaboration with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra exploring Igbo conceptions of the origins of music; and The Three Sisters (2024), a large-scale architectural lighting installation displayed across Pittsburgh’s three Sister Bridges.
Redd has also directed the documentary films Miracles: The Redd Family Collection of Black Art (2025) and Between Us, The Gaze: Ajamu X / FIERCE: Pittsburgh (2026). His essays span Black literature, photography, music, and visual culture. His forthcoming book, Rainbow Serpent Cosmology Gate 0: A Black Queer Theory of Number and Mythogenesis, articulates a contemporary Black queer spiritual system rooted in African cosmological traditions.
Image by Ajamu X