Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Textiles, Sculpture, Beadwork
Website: demetribroxton.com
Demetri Broxton was born in 1979 in Oakland, California, where he was raised and continues to live and work. Of Louisiana Creole and Filipino heritage, he traces a family history that moved across the American South before settling in the East Bay, and that migration has become the central subject of his art. He earned a BFA in art practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, with an emphasis in oil painting, and an MA in museum studies from San Francisco State University in 2010.
Broxton worked as a figurative oil painter for more than a decade before the birth of his second child made sustained studio hours impractical. He asked his mother to teach him to knit, moved from there to tatting and then to tatting with beads, and by 2017 had arrived at the beaded soft sculptures that now define his practice. The shift was also shaped by the death of his father and by a cache of twentieth-century family photographs handed down by his grandmother, which he began to treat as source material for a sustained inquiry into ancestry and cultural memory.
Alongside his studio practice, Broxton has built a parallel career in arts institutions. He was a curator for the City of Berkeley from 2014 to 2020 and served as Senior Director of Education and Public Programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco from 2016, where he developed programming around exhibitions such as Black Refractions. In 2024 he was named Executive Director of Root Division in San Francisco, the organization’s first new director in nearly two decades. He has received the Kala Master Artist Award (2021), a Kala Parent-Artist-in-Residence award (2022–2023), a Sustainable Arts Foundation award (2022), and a Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort grant (2024). His work is held in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum, the Norton Museum of Art and the Monterey Museum of Art.
Broxton’s best-known works begin with a pair of Everlast boxing gloves, which he encrusts entirely in cowrie shells, Japanese delica and Czech seed beads, mirrors, coral and nylon thread, then suspends from stainless steel chain. The beading technique draws on the sacred art of the Yoruba of Nigeria and on the long-season handwork of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians; the chains, the drip of red beads and the hand-embroidered text borrow from hip hop and graffiti. The gloves themselves carry the history of Black boxers from Jack Johnson to Joe Louis, and Broxton’s own grandfather, who boxed during the Second World War. Because the cowrie shell circulated as currency in the transatlantic slave trade, every surface in these works doubles as both ornament and ledger.
More recently Broxton has turned to large textile panels built from family photographs screen-printed onto Japanese sateen cotton and then overlaid with beadwork, sequins and shells. Removing the photographic backgrounds, he lifts his unnamed and half-named relatives out of the historical conditions that framed them and sets them inside new, deliberately devotional surroundings. The results are dense, slow, labor-saturated objects — closer to a reliquary or an altar cloth than to a picture — that treat craft itself as a form of remembrance and resistance.
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