Zekarias Musele Thompson

Lives and works in Oakland, CA and Reykjavík, IS

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2026
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The Meeting Place

solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)
July 24th to September 1st, 2024 oil on canvas, oil and archival pigment print on Canson ARCHES BFK Rives paper, Scotch Delicate Surface Painters tape, eight sonic compositions, spatial facilitation, meeting

curated by Key Jo Lee

          The Meeting Place gathered seven diptychs and one triptych of paintings on photographs, alongside ad infinitum (The Meeting Place), an oil-on-canvas painting installed on the floor of the gallery, and Everything is a collapseable yet solid structure, an installation of painters tape and oil. Eight continuous sonic compositions, also titled The Meeting Place, played in the gallery throughout the run. ad infinitum was painted in the studio while listening to those compositions, a reverse-engineered score of music that technically preceded it.

The painted photographs intervened in sites significant to the artist's subjectivity: among them the Equal Justice Initiative's Peace and Justice Memorial in Montgomery, where Peace and Justice paints a rectangle of attention around the name of Cesar Sheffield, the artist's great-grandfather, among the named lynching victims, and the Methuselah grove in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, home to the oldest living non-clonal tree on earth. The exhibition drew on the bark cloth tradition of the Mbuti people of the Ituri rainforest, and on modernism's extractive relation to both African object-making and to photography's framing of the colonized subject.

The exhibition was activated on opening day with spatial facilitation #8, moving through the gallery and interpreting each work through the saxophone. Later in the run, a performance of the composition The Meeting Place was held with ensemble and 16mm film, alongside an artist talk.

© 2026