Lives and works in Oakland, CA and Reykjavík, IS
Bio & Statement
CV
Exhibitions & Projects
2026
2025
2024
2023
return to home
Lives and works in Oakland, CA and Reykjavík, IS
Bio & Statement
CV
Exhibitions & Projects
2026
2025
2024
2023
return to home
Zekarias Musele Thompson (b. 1983, Washington, DC) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Oakland, CA, and Reykjavík, IS, working in oil painting, photography, installation, sonic composition, and performance. Their practice uses the material and spatial conditions of exhibition spaces, landscapes, and daily life to examine how we perceive and assign value — to art objects, to materials, to one another, and to the world we inhabit together. Zekarias received their MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2025. They have presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (2024), CULT Bureau, Oakland (2025), and Associate Gallery, Reykjavík (2025). Their thesis installation, Remnants and Possibilities, was presented at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2025). They have performed and presented work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Hamraborg Festival in Kópavogur, Iceland, among others.
Zekarias facilitates the Togetherness Ensemble, a rotating ensemble convened to hold space for communal resonance through emergent composition. They are a co-founder of Working Name Studios, a collectively owned and organized arts institution with the mission of building institutional stability and equity for underrepresented creative practices, ideas, and people. They were a 2024 Emerging Artist Program awardee at the Museum of the African Diaspora.
Since 2016, my practice has expanded the scope of conditional art—a term Robert Irwin developed for installations that "focus on the potential of immediate aesthetic experience as a resource for the suspension of habit and prejudice," as Matthew Simms describes. I utilize the psychological and material architecture of exhibition and performance spaces to examine biases that contextualize our perception of the art object. My work combines historical research, critical theory, sonic and visual field recordings, appropriated Western cultural materials, industrial materials, digital noise, and oil painting into dense, mediated layers of objecthood and performance, abstracting narrative and visual information to diffuse conditioning that pervades our notions of art and aesthetic value.