Reconstructing History
Demetri Broxton:
Ancestral Echoes – Crops of Empire
Museum of the African Diaspora
Ongoing – August 16
Demetri Broxton Has Questions:
How do we honor those we cannot fully name? How do we create space for them to exist, finally, as whole?
This exhibition begins to answer those questions.
[Here, in reverse order]
Creating Space
This installation features an ongoing body of work that explores the fragile process of reconstructing ancestry in the presence of incomplete histories, oral memory and archival images. Working with family photographs whose subjects are often unnamed or only partially identified, Broxton engages in a personal reckoning with the gaps created by loss, migration and time.
The show traces the Broxton family’s travels across the American South, westward to Oakland, CA. The works reflect on both the search for opportunity and the rupture in intergenerational knowledge that migration can produce. His art does not attempt to resolve these gaps, but to hold and transform them.
Honor
“I place my ancestors into new visual and spiritual contexts — ones that center dignity, protection and possibility. Sequins and beads function as both adornment and armor, transforming each portrait into a site of reverence, where absence becomes space for reimagining.”
Broxton is committed to honoring ancestral legacies while reimagining a more liberated future through art. As such, his work provides an opportunity to weave Black lives and dominant culture into a cohesive reality.
Your Author Has Questions:
Who is Demetri Broxton? How do I describe his extraordinary artwork?
[In reverse order]
His Artwork
He creates layered textile-based pieces combining archival photographs, screen-printed fabrics and sacred materials like cowrie shells, beads, coral, mirrors and other materials connected to African diasporic spiritual and vernacular traditions. By removing the original photographic backgrounds, Broxton releases his subjects from the constraints of their historical conditions and situates them within new visual and spiritual frameworks. Through hand-embellishment and ritual process, he transforms painful histories into sites of reverence and healing.
Unique to this installation is the centerpiece – a mobile altar featuring living tobacco plants grown by the artist. Thus, inviting the community’s participation and reflection.
Ancestral Echoes asks what it means to carry forward those who came before us – not as fixed histories, but as living presences shaped with care and imagination. Through the storytelling and embodied memory in these works, Broxton examines the violent histories behind foundational cash crops (cotton, tobacco, sugar and rice), while honoring the cultural knowledge and resilience passed down through generations of Black life in the Americas.
As a whole, Broxton’s work explores how enslaved and post-emancipation African Americans cultivated these crops, all while reimagining his ancestors as sacred, dignified figures of spiritual endurance and resistance.
Demetri Broxton
Demetri Broxton is a mixed media artist whose work explores ancestral memory and cultural identity within the African Diaspora. His textile sculptures reflect his connection to the sacred art of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, the beading traditions of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indigenous Peoples and his love of hip hop and graffiti. Elements of Nigerian royal regalia, sports equipment with significant ties to African American history, Southern voodoo/hoodoo traditions and quotes from hip hop artists are seamlessly blended within his beaded works. Integrating his Louisiana Creole and Filipino heritage, his practice draws from African diasporic spirituality, New Orleans culture and global Black histories.
Broxton's work is held in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Monterey Museum of Art and Norton Museum of Art.
He will be the Artist Speaker at the San Leandro Art Association meeting on February 9, 2027.
For more information, click here.
