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 historical tapestry 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 laced with amulets of power, transgression, healing, peril, and protection; they all tell stories of struggle and triumph. 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, Culture Magazine, and L’Officiel. ____ Sharon Barnes understands the seminal power abstraction delivers. Her visual and poetic expression emerged from her decades-long evolution in thinking and working within interiority, the liminal space that is abstract thinking. The ‘figure’ of the painting is Barnes’ implied embodiment of Black history and culture within an abstract form. She expresses this conceptual accommodation so deftly: I’m using the open-ended languages of abstraction alongside the poetic resonance of process and materials so I can point to, without literally depicting, the layered complexities surrounding identity, culture, and Black lived experience. I frequently infuse my works with culturally reverberant materials. Black-eyed peas, sweet tea, quotidian items, and other such materials, as they find their way into the physical and conceptual layers of my work. Exhibiting both nationally and internationally, Barnes’ large-scale painting, Music is What We Make in Music’s Absence is currently installed in the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. Solo exhibitions and projects include her current 40-foot wide vitrine installation, Replotted Paths & Replanted Gardens in the Tom Bradley International Terminal of the Los Angeles Airport (LAX). Barnes’ work is held in the permanent collections of the California African Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the UCLA Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, the City of Inglewood, and others. She is a recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship, NH; the City of Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Fellowship (COLA); the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, MI; and the Spelman College Summer Art Colony/Taller Portobelo, Panama.