Work
Press Release
SHARON BARNES:
Improvisations of a Polyrhythmic Being
DEMETRI BROXTON:
Ancestral Echoes
SHARON BARNES | When the Music Ends There is Remainder, a Persistence Lingering in the Breach (Fred Moten) | 2024 |60 x 48 inches (152 cm x 121 cm) } acrylic, ink, oil crayon, fabric dye, thread, burlap and salvaged canvas on canvas
DEMETRI BROXTON | Untitled (in-progress) | 2024 | mixed media on canvas | 36 x 28 inches
Exhibition Dates: September 14 – October 19, 2024
Reception: Saturday, September 14th from 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Events:
🗓️ Saturday, October 5th at 1:00 pm:
SHANA NYS DAMBROT IN CONVERSATION with Sharon Barnes & Demetri Broxton
We’ve invited Shana Nys Dambrot, who recently received the 2024 Los Angeles Press Club Award for Art Critic of the Year, to lead the artists in what will undeniably be a riveting conversation!! Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown Los Angeles. A contributor to the Village Voice, Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications, she was the Arts Editor at LA Weekly until 2024. Recently she launched 13 Things LA, a weekly Art Calendar featuring curated reviews & recommendations in Los Angeles. She studied Art History at Vassar College, writes book and catalog essays, curates and juries exhibitions, is a dedicated Instagram photographer, and is the author of the experimental novella Zen Psychosis (2020, Griffith Moon). She speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally, and is a recipient of the Rabkin Foundation Art Writing Prize (2022), the MOZAIK Future Art Writers Grant (2022 & 2024), and the LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year Award (2022).
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It’s with great pleasure that PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY announces two concurrent one-person exhibitions with Los Angeles painter Sharon Barnes and Oakland multidisciplinary artist Demetri Broxton. Both artists are steeped in conceptual practices, using collage and nontraditional materials to celebrate and honor Black endurance, distinction and achievements.
‘The Space of Time Danced Through (Improvisations of a Polyrhythmic Being)’ is a series that gleans from ways that Black music – not only in its form, but in the way it has often functioned as a psychological and metaphysical mechanism for managing both the pain and joy in life, producing the distinctly American art forms of blues, field hollers, gospel, jazz, party music, and protest songs.” – Sharon Barnes
With roots in the music industry as a songwriter, Sharon Barnes lyrical, non-representative paintings hold in their making and materials social and political stories of ancestral remembrance and fierce self-determination. That an abstract painting personifies the conceptual framework of resistance, joy, and resilience has precedence in art history, including Revolutionary Russia, where Malevich wrote, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism” (1916). This revolutionary, nonobjective painting style embodied the politics and worldview of a new era, as well as a clear demarcation from the failed institutions of Czarist Russia.
Understanding the power abstraction delivers, Barnes visual and poetic expression of intention 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 find their way into the physical and conceptual layers of my work.
Sharon Barnes is a fifth generation Californian born in Sacramento, CA. Barnes lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned her MFA at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles. A lifelong creative, Barnes was also formerly engaged in music as a songwriter, credited on numerous recordings featuring major artists.
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). Notable group exhibitions include Risky Business: A Painter’s Forum at the Torrance Art Museum (2024), an exhibition of recent acquisitions at the Crocker Art Museum (2022); Adornment /Artifact, supported by The Getty and curated by jill moniz (2022); and at the California African American Museum, Hard Edged: Geometrical Abstraction (2015) as well as an important Survey Exhibition of African American Artists in Los Angeles, Pathways 1966-89 curated by Dale Brockman Davis (2005).
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.
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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 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. Boxing matches were often mixed-race, amplifying racism throughout America. 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.
Demetri Broxton‘s work as the Education Director at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco is synonymous with his passion for educating and writing about the ideas inherent in every work of art he creates. Born and raised in Oakland, CA, he earned a BFA at UC Berkeley in 2002 with an emphasis in painting. Upcoming exhibitions include 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.