Photo by Paiwei Wei for HARNESS
by Evan Nicole Brown
Patrisse Cullors believes in the power of alchemy. The artist and abolitionist from Los Angeles, California has long been drawn to the unseen, and is inspired by the beauty of freedom found in different planes and dimensions. “The art that I’m making asks the viewer to witness the whole of their humanity,” Cullors says.
Over the last two decades, Cullors’ art and performances have been featured at cultural institutions across the globe, to include The Broad, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, LTD Gallery, Crystal Bridges Museum, The Fowler Museum, Frieze LA, The Hammer Museum, Vashon Center for the Arts, Langston eHughes Performing Arts Center, and Southern Guild. Her work also will be featured as part of a major exhibition at LACMA during fall 2024.
In June, Cullors’ first show as a solo artist — “Between the Warp and Weft: Weaving Shields of Strength and Spirituality” — will debut at Charlie James Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Following her inclusion at the Fowler Museum of UCLA’s major exhibition exploring Yoruba sacred arts from Africa and beyond, “Between the Warp and Weft” is a deep and resonant exploration of Yoruba culture and the Ifá tradition of which Cullors is a practitioner. Many of the works center around the sword of Oya, the fierce Orisha of transformation and Cullors’ own spiritual guardian, whose machete is embraced as a spiritual emblem of power, protection, and divine justice. Here, Oya's sword transcends its historical significance to address the pressing narrative of our times — the need for protection and reverence for Black women.
Prayer to the Iyami For Allegories of Flight, The Broad, Photo by Giovanni Solis
The exhibition fuses Malian mud cloth textiles, cowrie shells, and metalwork to create what Cullors refers to as “a sanctuary of reflection and empowerment.” Each work is a testament to the resilience of Black women; and to this end, Cullors has dedicated each piece to a different Black woman in her life, including Senga Nengudi and Jackie Sykes, to whom she wants to extend protection. Over the last several years, a central question that has emerged for Cullors on her healing journey has been: what does it take to be protected as a Black person, specifically a Black woman, in America?
“A lot of the work that I’ve done has been around the trauma of being Black in America, and also our resilience,” she explains. “We don't have the cultural right to protect ourselves — there’s a concept of protection, but that only extends to whiteness and white bodies. Right now, Black people can’t protect themselves. But what if we create spiritual objects of protection?”
Origin Film Screening, Baldwin Hills Cinemark Theater, Photo by Giovanni Solis
Ori Whispers Procession, Fowler Museum, Photo by Patrick Shao
Cullors’ artistic practice, which is in part inspired by Los Angeles’ Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, invites the use of artworks as spiritual guardians that exist beyond the visual plane and become both urgent cultural commentary and spiritual armor. “We didn't just call for the eradication of white supremacy, but also built a visual aesthetic that embodied liberation,” Cullors muses. “I see my works as spiritual objects that I’m offering to the public, almost like going back to the objects of our people. Many of our objects that were stolen and looted were spiritual objects that weren’t quote unquote art. They were sacred objects that were, and still are, helping us with the alchemy of our time.”
This exhibition will be Cullors’ second showing at Charlie James Gallery. In 2023, she participated in a duo show with longtime collaborator noé olivas called “Freedom Portals,” which the New York Times described as a “surprising exhibition of spiritually reflective and esoteric artwork … rejecting the strident, declamatory tenor of much political art.” As part of the exhibition, Cullors created tapestries of 12 of the 16 Odús, which are “books” — or signs and symbols — used for divination in Ifá, and she intends to eventually make all 256 signs using vintage Malian mud cloth, metal, cowrie shells, and etchings.
North Star Project: Healing Generations, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Photo by alexandre ali-reza dorriz
Cullors’ background as a visual and performing artist dedicated to leveraging the power of art and community organizing to catalyze social change — as co-founder of Black Lives Matter and founder of The Center For Art and Abolition — has led her to popularize a new phrase for artists and cultural workers: abolitionist aesthetics. As a New York Times bestselling author of “When They Call You A Terrorist” and “An Abolitionist’s Handbook,” Cullors uses both art and language to reimagine current frameworks in favor of new approaches to liberation and community care.
Abolition is traditionally defined as “the act of abolishing a system, practice, or institution,” which is at the heart of Cullors’ work across mediums — and eras in her career. But according to Cullors, whose new terminology insists upon a deepening of this definition, “the term ‘abolitionist aesthetics’ comes from the desire and clarity that in order to transform the world into an abolitionist imaginary, we need to build an aesthetic around what abolition is. And we need to create spaces and places that really help us define that and help us visualize it.” For Cullors, that looks like using the physical materiality of mixed-media to make the concept of abolition tangible through the use of non-traditional motifs and references. In a world that rewards proof and data, guiding audiences to see her practice of using culturally resonant symbols to agitate for new structures in galleries and communities, proves another world is indeed possible.
It’s Dangerous Times, We Have to be Connected, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Photo by Giovanni Solis
Cullors’ practice is informed by a history of arts movements, which often exist at the intersection of social change and art-as-commentary — a critical departure from art produced for art’s sake. Ultimately, the artist’s multifaceted approach to working across a range of mediums — from performances to public activations, exhibitions to social change movements — is all in an effort to “upend the prison industrial complex,” she says.
Cullors is the co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, an artist collective and art gallery in South Central Los Angeles. “I believe in alternative institution building, and that the current art market is deeply flawed and largely doesn’t benefit Black woman artists. And if there is some sort of resource benefit for us, we’re not at the helm of that,” Cullors says, adding: “The role of Crenshaw Dairy Mart is to challenge that.” The team there, which is led by Cullors and her co-founders noé olivas and alexandre ali reza dorriz, uses abolitionist guidelines to challenge other institutions they collaborate with to create programming for a more equitable and free future.
Respite, Reprieve, and Healing: An Evening of Cleansing, The Big House, Photo by Giovanni Solis
In 2019, Cullors launched a groundbreaking Social and Environmental Arts Practice MFA program at Prescott College, where she served as the Founding Director for two years. She has also helped build and lead abolitionist movements with Justice LA, Dignity and Power Now and Reform LA jails. Cullors has won numerous awards and received honors for her art and activism practices over the course of her career, including the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ unanimous approval of her appointment to serve as one of three Second District Arts Commissioners in 2021. She was also recently selected for a one-year creative strategist-artist residency with the County of Los Angeles Homeless Initiative.
The evolution of Cullors’ creative output and techniques, as evidenced in the forthcoming solo show at Charlie James Gallery, is borne of a calling to express the full humanity of who she is, unconfined to a single medium or dimension. “As a Black woman who’s an artist, entrepreneur, author, writer, it’s always been an expectation that I shrink, that I only do one thing…so part of what I have wanted to live out loud is that I’m a full human being that is very interested in the fullness of our humanity and the ways that we can access freedom. I believe that the way we access freedom is by practicing freedom — and the way I practice freedom is by doing all the things that move me to create.”