David Alekhuogie

David Alekhuogie’s selection of six photographs, made between 2017 and 2025, brings together works from his Pull_UP series and his more recent fabric-based compositions. In Pull_UP, layered waistbands answer Barack Obama’s call for young Black men to “pull up their pants,” revealing how respectability politics works as a subtle yet enduring form of subjugation. These photographs monumentalize the Black masculine body while fracturing the gaze upon it, transforming clothing into abstract planes that echo color field painting while unsettling its neutrality. In later works Alekhuogie printed photographs onto canvas to construct voluminous, tactile forms, borrowing from the languages of quilt and collage. The flat, rectangular photograph becomes pliable, stretched and layered into objects that hover between documentation and decoration. Made in his mother’s Los Angeles garden, these still lifes fold domestic space into questions of visibility, intimacy, and power. The distinctive light of Los Angeles and the histories embedded in its neighborhoods infuse the work, situating it within the city’s racial and social topographies. Grounded in the lineage of West Coast conceptualism, Alekhuogie presses fabric, body, and landscape into dialogue, treating geography itself as a politicized surface.

David Alekhuogie was born in 1986 in Los Angeles. Through research-based practice, Alekhuogie, a photographer and educator, explores the construc- tions of race, gender, and power. Recent solo exhibitions include Assembly, Houston (2023); Yancey Richardson, New York (2021); Kate Werble Gallery, New York (2020); Company Gallery, New York (2019); Common- wealth and Council, Los Angeles (2019); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2019); University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (2018); Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles (2017); and the Chicago Artists Coalition (2016). Recent group ex- hibitions include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2025); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2024); Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY (2024); High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2024); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020). He is the recipient of honors including a Harvard Uni- versity Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2025); Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2019); and an Ox-Bow LeRoy Neiman Foundation Summer Fellow- ship (2013). Alekhuogie earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013) and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT (2015).