Work
Press Release
NEXUS 2026, San Francisco
Artists: Demetri Broxton, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Reyah and Jamele Wright Sr.
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY at Minnesota Street Projects!
Location: Minnesota Street Projects, 1275 Minnesota Street, Suite 211, San Francisco
Exhibition Dates: Thursday, October 1 – Saturday, October 10, 2026
Reception: Saturday, October 3rd, 5-7pm
In Conversation: Saturday, October 3rd, at 2pm. Demetri Broxton, Ramekon O’Arwisters, and Reyah. Join us for a free-ranging discussion about the ideas and materials of their respective practices.
Closing Mixer: Saturday, October 10th, 2:30-5pm
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to do a month-long pop-up at Minnesota Street Projects, where the gallery will present 2–2-week exhibitions. The First Exhibition, in celebration of NEXUS, a program of MoAD, features artists Demetri Broxton (Oakland), Ramekon O’Arwisters (San Francisco), Reyah (Los Angeles), and Jamele Wright Sr (Atlanta). The artists included in the exhibition employ, or reveal textiles as a medium of heritage, culture, and social politics. Their works explore diasporic and personal histories, non-conforming gender expectations, and our cultural expression and suppression.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Demetri Broxton’s 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 diasporic stories of Black America’s struggle and triumph.
Broxton recently closed his first one-person museum exhibition, Ancient Echoes, curated by Key Jo Lee at MoAD. Demetri Broxton is the executive director for Root Division, San Francisco. Prior to Root Division, 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. Exhibitions include: Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; allegedly, the past is behind us, ICA San Jose, CA; Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift, de Young Museum, San Francisco; and Second Skin, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Recent press includes Hyperallergic, 2026; CARLA, 2025; Artforum; KQED 2026 San Francisco; Culture Magazine, and L’Officiel.
SCHISM, Ramekon O’Arwisters 2025 exhibition at PSG, was a fracture, division, disharmony in beliefs or rules by which we live and understand relationships, politics, religion, community. The choice of SCHISM as a title was not so much a reflection of discord within O’Arwisters but an acknowledgement of chaotic shifts and swings in predictability and safety. Targeting, overreach, and coded responses are not new to Black Americans; finding ways to navigate being Black and Queer between hazards is present in this pop-up, a watery ground of coded abstraction. On view will be the artists’ iconic bound leather sculpture, Black on Black; and tapestries from the Bound in Black series
Born in Kernersville, North Carolina, Ramekon O’Arwisters earned a M.Div. from Duke University Divinity School in 1986. Residencies include the 2021 McLaughlin Foundation Award for The Project Space at Headlands Center for the Arts, Artist-in-Residence program, the de Young Museum Artist in Residence; the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Grants and Awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2020/21; Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, NY; the San Francisco Foundation; the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Initiatives Program; Black Artists Fund, Sacramento; and the Eureka Fellowship awarded by the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco.
Recent museum exhibitions include Unbound, Art, Blackness and the Universe, curated by Key Jo Lee, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD); House of, Craft Contemporary Museum Los Angeles (2025); Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Collection, DeYoung Museum of Art (2023); San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, FIGHT AND FLIGHT: CRAFTING A BAY AREA LIFE; American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Making in Between: Gender Identities in Clay (MIB:GIC); San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Queer Threads and a solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Freeform and Razor Sharp. Upcoming museum exhibitions include Ramekon O’Arwisters, In Between, SFMoMA Koret Education Center, San Francisco and EnMasse, Accumulation & Abundance in Contemporary Sculpture at the Fuller Craft Museum in 2026, curated by Beth McLaughlin. Recent press includes Hyperallergic 2025; “Artist Takeover,” Artillery Magazine 2025; Essence Magazine 2025; “In the Studio”, a video production of the Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, plus more.
PSG successfully debuted a stunning series of archival pigment prints from Reyah, a self-taught artist, at Untitled Art 2023. Reyah’s body of work in self-portraiture represents a multi-year timeline of building knowledge and experience with their medium-format camera. Their photography explores cultural iconography, and staged narrative to explore gender, childhood trauma, religion, and the Black body. The artist takes agency with all aspects of their process, constructing the costumes, lighting their body, and finally exposing the shot. Reyah was a guest speaker in a series produced at MoAD, In the Artists Studio—Reyah. Their work is held in national collections.
Bundles emerged during a pivotal moment in Jamele Wright Sr’s practice, extending the ideas first explored in In– Transit while laying the foundation for later bodies of work including ReBORN and Levitate. Created after returning to Atlanta from graduate school in New York, the series grew from an ordinary experience that unexpectedly opened onto a larger historical reflection.
“Preparing for the move home, I found myself trying to fit everything I had accumulated over two years into my Honda Pilot. Paintings, books, clothing, furniture, and studio materials were compressed into every available space. As I packed, I began thinking about the difficult choices faced by so many Black Americans escaping the violence and systems of control that defined the Jim Crow South, often carrying only what they could. My own journey was a reverse migration, but it became a point of entry into questions of movement, memory, sacrifice, and survival within the Black American vernacular experience.”
Constructed from found wood, Georgia red clay, rope, discarded toys, architectural remnants, and hand sewn Dutch wax cloth pouches inspired by the protective qualities of gri gri bags, each sculpture gathers fragments of lived experience into bound forms. Spray paint became an essential material in this series, reflecting the influence of Hip Hop and its ability to sample, layer, and transform disparate cultural references into new forms. Like sampling, the sculptures assemble materials that retain their individual identities while generating new meaning through juxtaposition.
Born and raised in Ohio, at the age of 22 Jamele Wright, Sr. moved to Atlanta, Georgia. Realizing that there were many young artists not being represented Wright started a gallery called Neo Renaissance Art House. After curating the gallery for over a year Jamele was inspired to pursue his own artistic career. After a number of solo and group exhibitions Wright graduated from Georgia State University with a B.A. in Art History, concentrating in African and African American Contemporary Art. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, New York. Residencies include MASS MoCA, the Vermont Studio Center and Golden Paint. Wright Sr. is represented in public and private collections.