In the moments before a production begins, the stage is dark, perhaps obscured by dramatic, swooping curtains,  the audience  seated, hands  folded in laps, waiting. Before light, color, and stories, there is only darkness and anticipation. For the multidisciplinary, Los Angeles-born artist Reggie Burrows Hodges, this is where the magic happens.

Before he begins a painting, Hodges covers his canvas in black: a silky, smooth, all-consuming color (or absence of color) upon which to build, addressing what he calls “blackness’ totality.” In this manner, the figures become closely tied to their backgrounds, their faces and forms only vaguely distinguishable from one another, each carrying a billowing depth.

This October, Hodges appears at the California African American Museum as part of its seasonal exhibition series, which centers on the Black traveler—one who moves between worlds and creates their own. “Across our Fall 2026 presentations, we explore the theme of the Black traveler and what it means to traverse boundaries,” says Cameron Shaw, CAAM’s Executive Director and Chief Curator. “Throughout these explorations, the literal and cosmic traveler helps us see that Black imagination is vast, diverse, and always, fundamentally, forging new paths for the world to follow.”

Hodges was born and raised in Compton, California; spent his teenage years in New York and Washington, DC; graduated from the University of Kansas on a tennis scholarship; and now lives and works between California and Maine. Throughout his life, his expertise has stretched across cultural contexts, from theater student to reggae band founder to professional tennis coach, and now to acclaimed painter.

Hodges’s first major institutional exhibition, Reggie Burrows Hodges: A Theater of Miracles at CAAM, arrives as part of a three-venue presentation across Los Angeles, alongside A Theater of Dreams at Art + Practice and A Theater of Passions at the Getty Center. At CAAM, his compositions reflect the influence of Old Master paintings on his art, balancing modern, everyday gestures with the dramatic grandeur of Renaissance works.

Rendered in acrylic and pastel, his work explores the imprecision and depth of memory and perception: how time and distance can alter our understanding of a scene, how presentation can transform the reception of a story. His soft, loose brushwork lends the paintings their ambiguity: his subjects, lacking identifying features, emerge as hazy sketches and outlines, born of negative space. Yet there is an indefinable liveliness, always: a drooping flower, a passing cloud, a rolling field—each in motion, alive, unfolding before us.