Film by LeXander Bryant, Archive South
Artist Statement
Shabazz Larkin is a multidisciplinary contemporary American artist working across painting, sculpture, murals, public art, and text. Drawing from portraiture’s long tradition and the enduring language of the monument, he approaches each work as a structure built to hold presence against time. Whether in a gallery or on a city wall, Larkin treats every piece as a monument. His figures emerge through the visual language of the sacred and the ornamental, shaped by Black diasporic traditions and American history. His work exists in conversation with artists who expanded the language of contemporary art. Like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, using text as form and material. Like Andy Warhol and Norman Rockwell, he engages the mythmaking of American life, while echoing Marcel Duchamp and Virgil Abloh’s tradition of recontextualizing everyday objects as cultural artifacts. Language enters the work as literature, inscription, and invocation, sharpening the image into communal testimony. Anchored by themes of fatherhood and community and guided by contemplative spiritual practice, Larkin’s works act as both empathetic witness and cultural protection. Through portrait, sculpture, and public installation, his monuments hold space for tenderness and power to coexist, where presence itself becomes the central act.
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