Zekarias Musele Thompson

Lives and works in Oakland, CA and Reykjavík, IS

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Exhibitions & Projects

2026
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Divine Weightlessness

solo exhibition and residency at CULT Bureau, Oakland, CA
October 4th to November 29th, 2025

oil and archival pigment print on paper, canvas, and linen, oil pastel on drywall and concrete, acrylic on canvas board, spatial facilitation, performance
Divine Weightlessness approached the form of the retrospective to acknowledge all life as practice. The exhibition gathered paintings made between 2023 and 2025, the period of my MFA at UC Berkeley and a turn in the practice toward painting as its central medium. The works spanned from the earliest pieces of that turn through paintings from I Paint the Mountain with Myself, alongside oil pastel drawings made directly on the walls of the gallery, extending the painted surface into the room and into the duration of the exhibition itself.

The retrospective is typically held in the context of a life of practice and offered as a comprehensive overview of a career. Divine Weightlessness used the form to acknowledge the quotidian and the sublime that together produce the art object. Two activations extended the exhibition's claims into the duration of its run. Werk Day (Life Forms) held the gallery as a community marketplace for a single Black Friday afternoon, inviting visitors to bring objects important to their identity narrative for exchange, conversation, and an oil pastel drawing made in return. Spatial Facilitation (the artist is presence) #2, with a guest performance by Psychic Charisma, extended the ongoing saxophone-based project of spatial facilitation: a sounded dialogue with the materials and beings of Temescal Alley, transmitted by signal into the gallery as the listener's room.

© 2026