Join us for a conversation & reception with Emerging Artist Program awardee Demetri Broxton about his solo exhibition Ancestral Echoes – Crops of Empire. Broxton will be in conversation with UC Berkeley Professor Leigh Raiford.

About the Exhibition

Demetri Broxton’s Ancestral Echoes – Crops of Empire explores the role of African Americans in cultivating the South's foundational cash crops: cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice. Using archival photographs, textile-based portraiture, and ritual adornment, Demetri Broxton reimagines ancestral figures as icons of labor, resistance, and spiritual endurance. At the center of the exhibition is a mobile altar featuring living tobacco plants grown by the artist, inviting community participation and reflection. Through material storytelling and embodied memory, this work examines the violent histories behind these crops while honoring the cultural knowledge and resilience passed down through generations of Black life in the Americas.

About the Speakers

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Demetri Broxton is a mixed media artist whose work explores ancestral memory, cultural identity, and spiritual resistance within the African Diaspora. Of Louisiana Creole and Filipino heritage, he creates layered textile-based pieces combining archival photographs, screen-printed fabrics, and sacred materials like cowrie shells, beads, coral, and mirrors. His practice draws from African diasporic spirituality, New Orleans culture, and global Black histories.

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Trained in painting at UC Berkeley (BFA) and Museum Studies at San Francisco State University (MA), Broxton merges studio art with research-driven storytelling. His current series, Ancestral Echoes, reimagines historical portraits into spiritual icons that honor the labor and lives of African Americans who cultivated crops like cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice. Through hand-embellishment and ritual process, he transforms painful histories into sites of reverence and healing.

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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 is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angeles.

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In addition to his studio practice, he serves as Executive Director of Root Division in San Francisco, where he supports emerging artists through exhibitions, education, and community engagement. Across both roles, Broxton is committed to honoring ancestral legacies while reimagining a more liberated future through art.

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Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates, and writes about Black visuality and world-making. She is the author of When Home is a Photograph: Blackness & Belonging in the World (2026), Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011) and co-author, with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler, of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024), among other publications. Raiford has also written essays on the work of numerous contemporary artists, including Dawoud Bey, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. She serves as Series Editor, alongside Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis, for Vision and Justice, an imprint of Aperture Books. In 2026, she was named the Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing by the Gordon Parks Foundation.

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