SHARON BARNES, DEMETRI BROXTON

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.

Abstraction allows me to express complexities and emotive properties that are non-linear, as I think about toughness, resilience, and the capacity to re-invent. It’s about improvisation as both a Black survival strategy and a cultural expression. Recurring visual motifs in my work include margins, borders, and hierarchies that sublimate into radical beauty and freedom — an insistence to be beautiful and free in spite of everything and because of everything.

-–Sharon Barnes

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