When Eyenga Bokamba opened Future Tense Gallery in the California Building in 2017, she was right on the cusp of a dream come true. She has a studio space in the Carriage House of the Casket Arts Building, but when a space opened up immediately next door to the gallery in the California Building, Bokamba jumped at the chance.
Art-A-Whirl® of 2018 was her first big California Building opening. Bokamba said it was a beautiful moment; she had been working on a solo show for a gallery in New York City that would open in June of 2018. She felt she had landed in a special ecosystem as an artist, one where the proximity of the two spaces allowed her to function at a higher level as an artist and curator.
Owners Jennifer Young and John Kremer, who’d helped facilitate her move, were very supportive of helping Bokamba implement her vision for the gallery; their team painted the whole thing white at her request. Bokamba said the fully white cube gave a kind of levitating effect. “It was really well lit. People looked fantastic in the gallery.”
From the outset, Bokamba wanted Future Tense Gallery to be a space that invited experimentation. “With the gallery space, I was able to highlight other artists in the building.” She invited artists to experiment with their artforms and push boundaries within genres.
A show Bokamba recalled as a perfect example of this was Madison Rubenstein’s solo show, “Too Much,” hosted in the gallery in 2023. Bokamba described the scale and brightness of the show as “glorious.” She said in her role as coproducer of the show, she got to marvel at how much Rubenstein “pushed themselves beyond all sorts of comfort in the over exploration of these really painful themes of exclusion, especially on the axis of disability.” Bokamba said that seeing Rubenstein reclaim and joyously embrace that neurodivergence was brilliant and unforgettable.
Another moment she recalled was Chloe Brigg’s groundbreaking show of non-traditional portraiture, called “Close.” The show featured detailed portraiture that explored themes of loss, anguish, and duplicity. “She mounted the show on the floor and against the walls, and then put cushions down so that you could actually physically get close to the pieces.”
As a curator, Bokamba’s ethos was to issue a very open-ended invitation to artists, to give them the space to showcase what their cutting edge was. She described a collaborative process of talking with each artist “about what their hopes and dreams were and what it might look like to mount a show based on that specific excitement. When you get an invitation that’s open-ended like that, you feel so honored.” The open-endedness allowed the shows to be less fixated on a product, and more focused on the process and who the artist was.
Bokamba has since transitioned Future Tense Gallery into a digital format; she’s currently focusing more on her own production as a multi-disciplinary artist. But she still offers Future Tense Gallery as a digital platform for artists’ shows.
Bokama loves the energy that Young and Kremer have established in the building. “It’s been great for me to have the California Building as my 100% primary base of creation. With the coffee shop, the big lobby, with the mosaic tiles on the front, when people walk in, it feels to me I’m able to welcome them into something that’s really professional and sacred and unique. It is a destination.” As both a creator and a curator, it has been a boon. “I think of so many instances where it was important to be able to welcome people into a larger creative context—and that’s for me what the California Building is.” Beyond her own studio ecosphere, she said, “I’m part of something bigger.”
By Katherine Boyce, April 25, 2025
Read more about Bokamba’s work here: https://northeastminneapolisartsdistrict.org/eyenga-bokamba-collaborates-on-translucent-beauty/