How do we honor those we cannot fully name? And how do we create space for them to exist, finally, as whole?

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Demetri Broxton: Ancestral Echoes is 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 a personal reckoning with the gaps created by loss, migration, and time.

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In this exhibition, Broxton turns toward those absences. Tracing his family’s movement across the American South and westward to Oakland, California, he reflects on both the search for opportunity and the rupture of intergenerational knowledge that migration can produce. The works do not attempt to resolve these gaps, but to hold and transform them.

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Using screen-printed textiles, beadwork, cowrie shells, sequins, and other materials connected to African diasporic spiritual and vernacular traditions, Broxton reimagines his ancestors as sacred figures. By removing the original photographic backgrounds, he releases them from the constraints of their historical conditions and situates them within new visual and spiritual frameworks.

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“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.”

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Ancestral Echoes ultimately asks what it means to carry those who came before us forward. Not as fixed histories, but as living presences shaped through care, imagination, and making.

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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.

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.

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.

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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About the Exhibition

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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.

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Tickets to visit MoAD and view the exhibitions:

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