Drawing on personal experiences and emotions, Alekhuogie's practice evinces a political thrust through his (re)consideration of familiar coded symbolic imagery such as clothing, the body, and the landscape we encounter in art history as well as contemporary life in advertising, news media, and popular culture. His ongoing Pull-Up series explores sagging—the style of wearing pants hanging low that was popularized in hip-hop. Close-up studio shots of the waist area showing the pants, underwear, and the torso form bands of color conflating the body, abstract painting, and the urban landscape. More recent explorations brought the images outside to be rephotographed among the flora and light of Los Angeles and to be printed on fabric and sewn into flag-like compositions, nodding to African-American quilting traditions. Alekhuogie attempts to articulate shared experiences of Blackness and masculinity in the United States, in particular underscoring how respectability politics polices and cleaves intergenerational kinship.

Alekhuogie has had solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Company Gallery, New York; and Skibum MacArther, Los Angeles. In 2019 he was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant.

Kibum Kim is a partner of the gallery Commonwealth and Council, located in Koreatown. He is also a lawyer and writer interested in the interactions of art, culture, politics, law, and business, as well as the Program Director of Art Business at the Claremont Graduate University’s Center for Business & Management of the Arts. He specializes in art law and art market dynamics.

Image: David Alekhuogie, target, 2019. Archival pigment print on canvas, UV varnish. Approx. 48 x 54 in (122 x 137 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.