The Black Power Tarot Exhibition

On display through September 25

About the Black Power Tarot

This exhibition includes 22 maximal scale fabric printed tarot cards that comprise the Black Power Tarot, created by King Khan & Michael Eaton under the supervision of Alejandro Jodorowsky.

A playlist accompanies the exhibit with a song for each tarot card curated by King Khan, to be played throughout.

More About the Black Power Tarot

Arish Ahmad Khan, known by his stage name of "King Khan" is a Canadian-born, Berlin-based multi-faceted musician, producer, writer and artist.

Khan divined the idea to create his own tarot deck through a series of dreams and visions he had while working on the film score for the Invaders, a documentary about a Memphis Black Power group whom Dr. Martin LutherKing Jr. began working with in his Poor People's Campaign.

Surrealist filmmaker and spiritual guru Alejandro Jodorowsky introduced Khan to the way of Tarot and spent years working with Philippe Camoin, the direct heir of the last of Tarot de Marseille printers in Marseille, France, to reconstruct a precise version of the Tarot de Marseille from the 1760s.

Khan asked Jodorowsky to supervise the creation of the Black Power Tarot and recruited Michael JamesEaton, a Belfast-based artist and designer for television series "Game of Thrones," to draw each card, which were then presented to Jodorowsky for his approval.

Combined with Khan's personal interest in reading and interpreting tarot, he found a way to bridge the "path of illumination" in the Tarot and the concept of black power by choosing the likenesses of 19 African American musicians, two African American magicians, one civil rights leader and one African American comedian to replace the archetypes found in the major arcana of the Tarot De Marseilles and to birth a new mythology for the 21st Century.

For the exhibit, the tarot cards are presented in maximal scale of 3.5 x 6’. A limited number of tarot decks and a Black Power Tarot coloring book will be available for purchase at the gallery.

The Major Arcana of the tarot is numbered to show the journey and transformation of the fool on an illuminated path to fully understand the world. Each card is a step closer in this journey.

The tarot is a language to understand the present, when you learn it you can help yourself and others realize the illuminated path. Fortune telling has nothing to do with this with this, and is considered to be a form of trickery.

I was invited to the house of Alejandro Jodorowsky, my spiritual guru, where he gave me my first deck of the tarot de marseilles. His first lesson to me was that for the purposes that we use tarot, it is enough to use only the major arcana. The message we are searching for is clearer to comprehend and easier to follow.

Jodo also taught me how most decks after the tarot de marseilles were just artistic impressions of this very important deck and most did not adhere to the sacred geometry of the original cards. This was a very important factor when I began designing the Black Power Tarot.

I made sure that the sacred geometry was fully respected because I wanted to be able to use this deck exactly like the tarot de Marseilles.

The task in choosing the right African American people for the cards had to be done"without my ego."

Jodo was adamant about me taking out my ego from the cards, in fact when he didn’t recognize Sister Rosetta Tharpe and assumed that it was me putting myself in the deck he said "you cant put yourself in the cards!"

Finally, I explained to him that it wasn't me and told him why I put Sister Rosetta Tharpe on the world card.

After I explained it he understood and told me to write out what I had told him and include that with the deck. He also loved the name "The Black Power Tarot"and gave me the blessing I had waited all my life to receive.

The Inspiration Behind the Black Power Tarot

During the past few years I began working on a film score for a Documentary about a black power group from Memphis called "the Invaders."

For almost two years I was immersed in doing this soundtrack and working hand in hand with the founder of theInvaders, John B. Smith and the film's director Prichard T. Smith. Then I had a dream, a premonition.

In my dream was Jodo and he asked me to show him "a card that is weird"- I immediately reached in my pocket and pulled out a card which we both stared at and agreed was very weird....When I awoke from this dream I had the vision to make the “Black Power Tarot.”

I wanted to choose the right African American people to fit into the archetypes of the major arcana. The reason being that in my eyes the people I chose for this were all ones who were able to follow the path of enlightenment and illumination in their lifetimes despite living in a time where racism and prejudice was so strong, deep and was a constant hurdle. I wanted to take these chosen folk and bring them into a mythos and transform them into the sacred tarot.

The challenge then was to find the right artist for this...like a miracle he contacted me right when i needed him, completely out of the blue. Michael Eaton, from Belfast, who previously worked mostly in film and television, was the one who painted all the flags and maps for the game of thrones.

I asked him to put the chosen people into the cards and to base it all around the Tarot de Marseilles and filled him up with the black power tarot vision. Michael was asked to carefully respect the sacred geometry of each card, right down to facial expressions and the way the eyes were looking, so that the black power tarot could also be used the same way.

The next step was getting the approval of Jodo, so I presented him with each drawing and asked him to sign off on each card. In the first round, he immediately congratulated us, he approved 15 out of 22 of the cards. The remaining 7 were corrected until they also received the stamp of his approval.

The concept of Black Power is about giving "All power to all the people." I wanted to blend this into the idea that these cards give anyone who wishes to learn this language the power to control their own destiny and follow a path of illumination and enlightenment. These cards are a mirror of the soul as much as they are always simply representing the truth.

Often the truth is what is feared the most, but if you let the tarot show you the way you will find an ancient wisdom that was passed on for centuries and that still remains strong and wise. When studying the tarot you must understand that chance and synchronicity exist and are connected.

If you set your spirit to do something it can achieve whatever you want it to. If try hard enough you can seek what Jodo calls "The Dance of Reality" and everything you set your mind on accomplishing suddenly falls into perfect order and does a jig right in front of your eyes.