Demetri Broxton’s ornate hand-stitched beaded portraits speak of ancestral stories. His art asks us to think about how we honor those we cannot fully name, and how to create space for them to exist as a whole. In Ancestral Echoes — Crops of Empire at the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD), Broxton continues his ongoing body of work exploring the fragile process of reconstructing ancestry amid incomplete histories, oral memory, and archival images. Working with family photographs, Broxton engages a personal reckoning to fill the empty spaces left behind by loss, migration, and time.
A space for reimagining
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.
— Demetri Broxton
Of Louisiana Creole and Filipino heritage, Broxton’s layered textile-based pieces use archival photographs, screen-printed fabrics, and sacred materials such as cowrie shells, beads, coral, and mirrors. African diasporic spirituality is combined with New Orleans culture and global Black histories. Ritual adornments weave together to reimagine African American ancestral figures as symbols of labor, endurance, and resistance.
The labor-intensive beadwork is a kind of dedicated cultural anthropology in which Broxton connects the gaps and fissures created by his own family’s movement across the American South and westward to Oakland. Original photographic backgrounds are removed, leaving the individual transformed into a glittering ancestral reliquary. Still Waters Run Deep (2025) combines sequins, cowrie shells, 24-karat gold-plated brass, rayon chainette, wool, and serigraph-printed Japanese cotton, transforming the central figure into a powerful presence. The traditional beadwork echoes the sacred and secular art of southwestern Nigeria and the adjacent region’s Yoruba people, with a gesture toward the artist’s own Creole heritage, as reflected in the beadwork of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians.
In A Family Tie is Like a Tree; It Can Bend but It Cannot Break (2026), a female figure, surrounded by Japanese and Czech glass beads, sequins, cowrie shells, and Swarovski crystals, wears a cheerful polka-dot dress as she places her gloved hand on a vehicle. The scene suggests a departure or arrival, but the nature of her journey remains a mystery. The reliquary remains unresolved, reminding us of the gaps in intergenerational knowledge that migration can produce.
He Who Holds Me to the Soil, Holds Himself As Well (2026) is dedicated to the figure of Robert Taylor, a tobacco farmer in North Carolina and the grandfather of fellow Bay Area artist Ramekon O’Arwisters. Brass stars and floating tobacco leaves move weightlessly around Taylor in a magic realist constellation of reverence and connection to the earth.
‘What Is Buried Still Feeds the Tree’
Ancestral Echoes — Crops of Empire remembers the role of African Americans in cultivating the South’s foundational cash crops. At the center of the exhibition is a mobile altarpiece aptly named What Is Buried Still Feeds the Tree, containing materials charged with ancestral memory, including living tobacco plants grown by the artist, acacia bowls, Carolina gold rice, sugar, and cotton. The material storytelling and tradition are brought to life in the altar, which embodies the memory of violent histories behind these crops while honoring the cultural knowledge and resilience passed down through generations of Black life in the Americas.
Emerging artists program at MoAD
Demetri Broxton is one of five artists in the Museum of African Diaspora’s Emerging Artists Program 2026–27. Selected from hundreds of applicants, each artist in the cohort will present solo exhibitions at MoAD from spring 2026 through early 2027.
In addition to his studio practice, Broxton 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.
‘Ancestral Echoes — Crops of Empire’ is on display at MoAD through Aug. 16.
