It’s with great pleasure that Patricia Sweetow Gallery announces concurrent one-person exhibition with Oakland multidisciplinary artist Demetri Broxton, Ancestral echoes. This artist is steeped in conceptual practices, using collage and nontraditional materials to celebrate and honor Black endurance, distinction and achievements.

My new body of work centers upon ancestors whose names and stories I don’t fully know. Most of them are soldiers who served in WWI. They fought to support a country that would continue to deny them full citizenship and equal rights.

(Demetri Broxton)

Time lays waste to our fragile fiber of ancestral connections. As Demetri Broxton looks through an archive of family photos, members whom he doesn’t know, and relationships he can only hazard a guess, he begins to weave speculative pictorial stories that inform his ancestral template of time. Those who might have guided his investigation departed long ago; thus, conjecture and imagination are left to form his hand-beaded, sequined, historical tapestries of those who came before. Selected family photos dating from both Great Wars are printed on Japanese sateen cotton, a smooth, luxurious substrate, whereupon Broxton adorns his family with resurrected life replete with color, texture, finery, and respect. Family members’ hardships and joys may be lost to their future heir, but America’s racist politics and history are not; thus, Broxton has posthumously provided an important window for Black Speculative Fantasy in Afro-futurism.

This is Demetri Broxton’s second solo exhibition in Los Angeles. His first exhibition with PSG was in 2018, where he debuted embellished boxing gloves, unfolding a complex narrative centered on the mythic stature of Black boxers, from Jack Johnson to his grandfather, who was a boxer during WWII. Broxton’s sculpture, whether gloves, tapestries, or robes, are hand-beaded, sequined, and sewn by the artist, laced with amulets of power, transgression, healing, peril, and protection. In the tradition of contemporary artists such as Myrlande Constant from Haiti, whose beaded tapestries tell of Vodou and Haitian history, or Igshaan Adams from Cape Town, whose abstract woven, beaded tapestries speak of post-apartheid South Africa, Demetri Broxton’s tapestries and sculpture tell of personal, community, and historic stories of Black America’s struggle and triumph.

We’d also like to recognize and congratulate Demetri Broxton on his recent appointment as the Executive Director of Root Division in San Francisco, the organization’s first new Executive Director in nearly two decades, succeeding Director Michelle Mansour. “Broxton, a Bay Area non-profit leader with a strong commitment to DEI, is excited to bring his expertise in education and fundraising from the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), where he was the Senior Director of Education. He looks forward to building on the programs and expanding Root Division’s current studio fellowships, such as the Bay Area Black Studio Artist Fellowship, Latinx Teaching Artist Fellowship, and more”. Prior to this recent appointment, Broxton served for 12 years as the Education Director at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, as the museum steadily grew from a regional museum to a nationally recognized leader in Black contemporary art and culture.

Born and raised in Oakland, CA, Broxton earned a BFA at UC Berkeley in 2002 with an emphasis in painting. We’re excited to announce uppcoming exhibitions in 2024 including, Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; and allegedly, the past is behind us, ICA San Jose, CA. Past museum exhibitions include Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift, de Young Museum, San Francisco; and Second Skin, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, CA. Recent press includes Artforum, Cultured Magazine, and L’Officiel.