In two striking exhibitions currently on view in Los Angeles–Moon, Turn the Flames…Gently Gently Away at Sean Kelly (May 16 - July 3, 2025) and Awol Erizku: X at CAAM (March 26–September 7, 2025)–Awol Erizku delivers a layered meditation on Black identity, cultural symbolism, and radical memory. Across photography, neon, sculpture, and sound, Erizku positions himself as both archivist and alchemist, reworking inherited iconography with deliberate provocation and spiritual weight. He doesn’t aim to fit into the art historical lineage; he challenges it, bends it, retools it for now.

With his first solo show at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, Erizku constructs a constellation of works that feels part ritual, part resistance. In Moon, Turn the Flames…Gently Gently Away, the familiar becomes newly charged: a Dodgers logo flows in Pan-African red, black and green and The Olympic rings–once symbols of global unity–are reimagined through Malcolm X’s five skin tones, a quietly loaded revision. In one of the exhibition’s most arresting gestures, cowrie shells replace bullet casings in forensic-style photos, transforming images of stage violences into spaces of ancestral mourning. It’s a show that burns and blesses in equal measure.

Music is always in orbit around Erizku’s practice, and here it’s elevated to an altar. The Most Influential Hip-Hop Albums of All Time, etched in stone, becomes both canon and tombstone–anchoring ephemeral cultural memory within the permanence of fine art. A curated mixtape runs alongside the exhibition, not as background noise but as part of its pulse.

Across town, at the California African American Museum (CAAM), Erizku’s X exhibition draws a direct line to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—Malcolm X—as both muse and metaphor. The exhibition was originally organized by SCAD and re-presented in Los Angeles by CAAm Executive Director Cameron Shaw, the exhibition spans photography, sculpture, archival material, and film. Erizku treats Malcolm X not as a frozen symbol but as a prism–of masculinity, faith, global consciousness, and personal transformation. With the 100th anniversary of Malcolm X’s birth approaching, the timing feels urgent, almost cosmic. Together the two shows form a kind of diptych: one facing the present, one the past, both charged with a deep reverence for revision. 

Set within CAAM’s broader seasonal programming highlighting the depth and range of Black art and history, X is one voice in a larger chorus. The museum’s slate includes tributes to Altadena’s Black artistic legacies, multimedia meditations on jazz collectives, architectural installations tracing Black migration, and archival excavations from slavery and sharecropping. Yet Erizku’s exhibition remains distinct in its balance of sharp aesthetic and spiritual depth. It's not just a retrospective, it's a reclamation. 

Taken together, Moon and X form a cross-city-call-and-response: one speculative, one devotional; one remixing symbols, the other re-grounding them in history. 

Erizku’s genius lies not just in remixing cultural symbols, but in making them vibrate with new meaning. In a city that constantly rewrites itself, his work insists on memory, consequence, and Black futurity. 

The flames, gently gently, are turning.

Moon, Turn the Flames...Gently Gently Away will open at Sean Kelly Gallery in Los Angeles Friday, May 16th from 5-7pm.