“If someone were to approach me and ask me what my work was about, I would say I’m a poet,” says the artist, filmmaker, and professor of the arts Isaac Julien. Known to mythologize the spirals of time with innovative films and photographic installations, which he calls “poetic arenas,” Julien conjures imaginative futures by re-performing the past. The radical doctrines of the Harlem Renaissance come back to life in his third solo exhibition “Once Again … (Statues Never Die),” a chronicle of the historical relationship between the distinguished philosopher Alain Locke and the champion of African material and visual culture Albert C. Barnes. In fact, these doctrines never left. —Nyla Gilstrap