McArthur Freeman is a transdisciplinary visual artist and designer whose body of work is a dynamic fusion of technology and traditional studio art practice. His creative explorations delve into themes of Blackness, social conditioning, and hybridity, employing a diverse array of mediums and techniques. Originally trained in drawing and painting, Freeman has expanded his expertise to include new media disciplines such as animation, digital modeling, 3D scanning, digital fabrication, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
His works have ranged from surreal narrative paintings and drawings to digitally constructed sculptural objects and animated films. He employs a variety of digital technologies, typically associated with film, games, and computer-aided design, to create many of his works.
Freeman’s sculptural and narrative practice integrates digital sculpting, 3D scanning, and fabrication techniques such as CNC routing and 3D printing. He creates works ranging from small-scale objects to large public installations in materials like bronze, resin, porcelain, and wood. His animations and images extend this approach into world building and visual storytelling, blending historical elements, popular culture, and fantasy to foster dialogue around Black lives. These works are often collaborative and span a range of tones, from subversive to educational, offering layered perspectives on the Black experience.
Freeman is also the co-founder of Imagine Blackness, an innovative project that combines AI technology and Black speculative storytelling to explore and reimagine Black representation. Together with his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Freeman is actively engaged in the complex intersections of race, technology, art, and social intervention.
Freeman earned his BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Florida, his MFA with a concentration in Painting from Cornell University, and a Master of Art and Design in Animation and New Media from North Carolina State University. He is currently an Associate Professor of Animation and Digital Modeling at the University of South Florida. Here, he continues to push the boundaries of digital tools, addressing traditional processes and exploring hybrid ways of making and thinking about art.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist Statement: My work explores the construction of identity, particularly Black identity, through hybrid forms, speculative narratives, and reimagined histories. Drawing from folklore, science fiction, popular culture, and lived experience, I create paintings, sculptures, and animations that move between the familiar and the surreal. These works often blend the beautiful and the grotesque, creating visual and emotional tensions that invite curiosity while challenging comfort.
This sense of tension runs through my interest in transformation, not only in physical form but also in the shaping of meaning and perception. Across mediums, I examine how bodies, histories, and cultural myths are fragmented, rewritten, or mutated over time. Folklore plays an important role in this process, serving not only as a source of imagery but also as a way of tracing how communities encode knowledge, memory, and resistance through narrative. In painting and animation, I construct narrative environments that combine stylized figuration with historical references and speculative elements, allowing memory, fantasy, and critique to coexist. My sculptural work extends these ideas through digitally modeled anatomical forms that are transfigured and fused with botanical and invented structures. These specimen-like hybrids carry traces of displacement, desire, trauma, and adaptation, as well as the long history of monsterization tied to the Black body.
Underlying these forms and images is a deeper investigation of systems. Constructed worlds reflect the structures that define our lived experience. Worldbuilding, in my practice, functions not only as a storytelling device but also as a framework for examining how identity and meaning are produced. The imagined spaces I create, which are strange, beautiful, absurd, and sometimes perverse, mirror the contradictions of the real. They reveal how race, power, and narrative influence what we see, how we are seen, and what is allowed to exist.
To build these layered realities, I move between digital and physical processes in a way that reflects the hybridity of the work itself. My use of digital tools such as 3D modeling, scanning, and sculpting is not only a method of production but also a way of thinking. These techniques become extensions of the conceptual work, allowing me to stretch and compress form, collapse time, and inhabit the space between what is remembered and what is imagined. Within that space, I shape bodies and worlds that resist containment and search for new ways to exist.