UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe is a groundbreaking exhibition that explores the intersections of Blackness and the cosmos. Curated by Key Jo Lee, MoAD’s Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs, the show invites visitors to reimagine Blackness not as fixed or earthbound, but as infinite—expansive, unknowable, and cosmically rich.‍

Inspired by Lee’s essay, “Gesturing Toward Infinitude: Painting Blue/Black Cosmologies,” the exhibition asks: What if we approached Blackness with the same wonder we bring to the universe? What if, like a black hole or distant star, Blackness could be a site of mystery, power, and transformation?

‍Featuring a global and intergenerational group of artists—including Lorna Simpson, Rashaad Newsome, Gustavo Nazareno, Harmonia Rosales, Didier William, and many more—the exhibition spans painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Works traverse the historical and the speculative, the scientific and the spiritual.

‍Three core themes guide the journey:

• Geo-Cartographic: Blackness mapped across earthly and celestial terrains.
• Religio-Mythic: Blackness as origin, cosmology, and creation story.
• Techno-Cyborgian: Blackness as posthuman—shaped by technology, hybridity, and the ability to move fluidly between identities. The posthuman is not one fixed form, but an evolving state of becoming, capable of multiple perspectives.

More than an exhibition, UNBOUND is a philosophical inquiry and sensory experience. A rich array of public programs, an onsite learning lab, and the museum’s first community-written labels ensure depth and accessibility for all visitors.‍

Ultimately, UNBOUND invites us to wonder: What else can Blackness be? When freed from institutional constraints and historical reductiveness, Blackness becomes luminous—an expansive mode of being, a cosmology of creative potential. The show invites us not simply to observe, but to wonder. To stand at the edge of the known and look out—into the dark, where unbound possibility lives.

UNBOUND: Blackness, Art & the Universe is made possible through the leadership support of KHR McNeely Family Foundation. Major support is provided by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CommonSpirit Health, and San Francisco Grants for the Arts. Significant support is provided by Jill Cowan and Stephen Davis, Crankstart Foundation, Ford Foundation, Gilead, Kaiser Permanente, Salesforce, and Westridge Foundation.  Generous support is provided by Cadogan Tate, CSAA Insurance Group, and San Francisco Foundation.

Additional exhibition support is provided by Jay Cowan, MD, CTK Architecture, Gisele de Chabert, Lynn and Sengal Selassie, and the Richard Mayhew Exhibition Fund.

Demetri Broxton: Ancestral Echoes — Crops of Empire | June 10 - August 16, 2026

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

About the Exhibition

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