Artist Biography

Phokus (b. 1972, Atlanta, GA; lives and works in Austin, TX) is a post-black, Afrofuturist artist whose expansive, Interdisciplinary practice moves fluidly across drawing, sculpture, sound, installation, curating and performance. Anchored in themes of memory, erasure, and reclamation, his work draws from the deep well of African American history, ancestral knowledge, and Southern cultural inheritance. Through a symbolic, process-driven language, Phokus explores the liminal spaces between visibility and obscurity, silence and sound, loss and transcendence. 

His large-scale drawings—often over five feet tall—operate as temporal membranes, where tobacco, graphite, doilies, feathers, and other charged materials become both medium and message. These works are acts of ritual and resistance, collapsing personal lineage with collective struggle. The presence of matriarchal labor, though never directly named, courses through each piece like a ghost print—familiar yet hidden. His mother, grandmother, and great-grandmothers are not subjects, but spirits—reverent energies embedded into the work through gesture, material, and memory. 

Phokus’ practice is also rooted in a lifelong engagement with sound—not as background, but as theory, structure, and atmosphere. Influenced by sonic innovators such as Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Flying Lotus, and Massive Attack, his sound installations and audio works abandon traditional song form, instead invoking landscapes that are immersive, dissonant, and speculative. These works—like his drawings—refuse linearity, instead constructing portals that collapse time and space, where the sacred and the spectral meet. 

He frequently sources from a wide array of archival materials: documented images of indigenous tribes, National Geographic magazines, graphic novels, spiritual texts, family photos, and Black literature. These fragments are excavated and recontextualized, forming an evolving visual lexicon that challenges dominant historical narratives while offering new ways to imagine Black existence outside of trauma, commodification, or containment. 

Deeply influenced by metaphysics, anthropology, mysticism, and diasporic movement, Phokus situates his work within the realms of the mythic and the remembered. He views darkness not as absence but as potential—a site where lost or discarded identities can resurface, shapeshift, and assert themselves anew. His art resists easy categorization, instead offering viewers a space to linger, witness, and be altered. 

Phokus has exhibited widely and continues to shape a critical dialogue around the power of Black imagination, the inheritance of silence, and the radical potential of reinvention. His practice is not only an exploration of form and memory—it is an invocation, a reckoning, and a reclamation.