Few futures are as scary as the Jetsons’. That’s one premise of sci-fi/fantasy writer N.K. Jemisin’s 2013 viral essay “How Long ’til Black Future Month?,” in which she pointed out a glaring problem with her genre: Historically, Black people were nearly absent from it. “What happened to all those people, in the minds of the show’s creators?” she asked. “Was there an apocalypse, or maybe a pogrom? Was there a memo?”
Will Kasso Condry describes his work — both solo creations and murals made with Juniper Creative Arts, which he runs with his wife, Jennifer Herrera Condry, and their daughter, Alexa Herrera Condry — as Afrofuturist. Though viewers may associate the style with the design of Black Panther’s Wakanda or the Sun Ra Arkestra’s elaborate performances, at its heart the artistic movement holds a premise so basic that the necessity of the statement is what’s shocking: In the future, Black people and culture survive. And because they do, the future thrives.
Those themes — thriving and survival — bubble through the surreal works in “Everything Is Everything: Will Kasso Condry,” on view through September 12 at BCA Center in Burlington. The exhibition comprises two distinct parts. The front gallery presents a solo show of the artist’s studio-based paintings. BCA’s back gallery has been turned into a Juniper Creative Arts workshop, where Kasso Condry and his wife have spent four weeks creating a mural with seven 16- to 21-year-olds in Burlington City Arts’ Artist Apprenticeship Program.
Many viewers will already be familiar with Juniper Creative Arts. Since 2020, the Condrys, who live in Brandon, have made dozens of murals with school and community groups across the state. In Burlington, those include “Kelis the Afronaut” at Champlain Elementary School and “Moringa the Medicine Woman” at the Old North End Community Center. Kasso Condry, 49, won both the 2022 Vermont Prize and the 2025 Herb Lockwood Prize in the Arts. Last year, the couple led the first session of the apprenticeship program, creating a mural about the history of Burlington’s Barge Canal that is now at BCA Studios on Pine Street.
This year’s project focuses on Burlington’s water utilities. After the show, the five-panel, 8-by-20-foot painting will be installed outside the Water Resources Division’s offices on Penny Lane, near the waterfront. The apprenticeship program — which is funded by the Lake Champlain Basin Program, hence the mural’s watery theme — aims to teach young people how to become professional muralists and artists in their own right.
Themes of thriving and survival bubble through the surreal works.
When Seven Days visited, one wall of the gallery was covered in sketches and printouts of research materials; Herrera Condry, 55, said the group spent the first two weeks touring the city’s water plants, looking at documents and ephemera in the University of Vermont’s historical archives, and hearing presentations from invited guests. Since then, they’ve worked on the mural both directly and by painting detailed portions of it on specially made mural cloth that they then cut out and collage into the larger image.
The scene the Condrys and their apprentices were working on depicts water pipes cascading from the mountain to Lake Champlain in a DNA-like helix that moves through an exposed roadway of rocks and pipes. Structures based on Burlington’s past water towers and other infrastructure dot the landscape. To one side, a 19th-century lumberjack clears trees; to the other, a contemporary child waters a new seedling. During our conversation, Kasso Condry started sketching peregrine falcon wings on the child; like characters in many of Juniper Arts’ murals, he’ll become an “Afro-Pollinator.”
Kelis, whom Kasso Condry called the “protagonist” of the solo show, was the first character in the series. She’s also the butterfly-winged subject of the mural at Champlain Elementary. Creating a project with elementary school students at a volatile time, during 2020’s pandemic quarantines and racial justice uprisings, was “a great way for us to work with young people, teach them about the beauty of pollinators, of Black folk,” Kasso Condry said. “Black people seed culture, pollinators seed life, and both are in danger.” The cast of characters expanded with each new project, he said: “Jennifer and I had literally been planting seeds all around Vermont in this public art.”
The Afro-Pollinators’ personal side comes to light in Kasso Condry’s smaller works, in which his whole family is cast in fantasy roles. His daughter, Alexa, was the model for the original Kelis mural, but here she takes on the role of an archer in carapace-like armor, monarch wings outstretched, a snake wrapped around her bow arm. Kasso Condry said he adopted Alexa, then 20, in 2018, after the couple married. She had already grown up in Vermont with a very different experience from his own formative years in New Jersey.
“Her racial politics started very young,” he said of his daughter. “She had to maneuver through different worlds,” which, he explained, inspired Kelis’ magical ability to travel through portals. “Even though it’s this mythical story, it’s based in a very harsh reality of just being Black in America, being Black in Vermont, being Black in the world.”
Other works in the show allude to a different saga: Kasso Condry suffered a health crisis starting in 2024 that nearly killed him. What turned out to be a serious lung condition evolved over several months as his body failed to process water properly, he said — a fact strangely resonant with the current mural project. In a poem accompanying a stark self-portrait, Kasso Condry writes, “Rest made me restless. / Waterlogged and weathered. / Rotting. / I’m getting close to my final destination.”
Yet in a different self-portrait, cast as “Vititi the Sage,” the artist rises from a pool of lily pads, his body surrounded by flowers. The work is paired with “Alkimila,” a portrait of Jennifer Herrera Condry as a mystical healer. Both oil paintings are tenderly observed depictions of the real people, even as they maintain transcendent cosmic vibes.
“Everything Is Everything” does an excellent job of presenting Kasso Condry’s skill as a world builder. That’s two worlds: The first is a mythical, Afrofuturist universe in which his own family takes on allegorical roles. The second is a community that celebrates, cultivates and funds young people creating visionary public art. In the Condrys’ hands, both fantasies seem to be wonderfully real. ➆
“Everything Is Everything: Will Kasso Condry,” through September 12 at BCA Center in Burlington.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The World Builder | In a solo show at BCA Center, Will Kasso Condry sows Afrofuturist mythology across studio paintings and public murals”
Updated August 20, 2026: An earlier version of this story misspelled the mural titled “Moringa the Medicine Woman.” A quote from Will Kasso Condry has also been corrected.
This article appears in August 19 • 2026.
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