Artist Statement: Contemporary American artist Shabazz Larkin situates his practice within portraiture’s long tradition and the enduring language of the monument. For Larkin, every work operates as a monument, whether intimate portrait or sculptural form, built to hold presence against time. Working across painting, sculpture, and text, he engages the visual language of the holy and the ornament to render figures shaped by diasporic traditions and American history. Language often enters his practice as inscription, refrain, and invocation, sharpening the image into communal testimony. Anchored by themes of fatherhood, community and guided by contemplative practice, Larkin’s paintings and sculptures function as both empathetic witness and cultural protection, where tenderness and power coexist and presence becomes the central act.

Rest In Peace While You Are Alive

Nka Gallery, North Nashville, Tennessee

Rest In Peace While You Are Alive was not just an exhibition—it was a gathering, a release, a small act of courage. It took place just after the first COVID vaccines became available, at a moment when death had been hovering in every conversation and absence had become routine. For many of us, it was the first time being together in public since lockdown.
The exhibition marked a return to shared space, shared breath, shared presence. There was grief in the room, but also relief. Laughter felt tentative. Joy felt newly earned. The work and the gathering served as a reminder to live now, to touch life while we still can, to honor the fragile fact of survival. For a brief night, the future felt possible again—not guaranteed, but imaginable.

Walkthrough of Nka Gallery

"I See You," Neon Sign 24x36, 2021

"Free Bird" Acrylic on Canvas, 40x60 

"Papa" Acrylic on Canvas, 40x60 

"Miles Sanctuary" Acrylic on canvas, oversized painting. (unfinished)

Many of the works shown that day were unfinished. They were shared not as resolved objects, but as offerings—presented out of a deep hunger to be present with others after so much isolation. The urgency of gathering outweighed the need for completion. In the months that followed, several of the portrait works were revisited, altered, and refined, carrying forward the memory of that first showing and the conditions under which they were revealed.

"Heavens to Marcy" Acrylic on unstretched canvas (unfinished)

El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Acrylic on Canvas

Hair Time, Acrylic on stretched canvas

Impervious, Acrylic on Stretched Canvas

Illusive Father, Acrylic on Canvas

James Baldwin & C.S. Lewis, Acrylic on Stretched Canvas

Jefferson Street, Acrylic on Canvas.

We Built This, Acrylic on Canvas

"God Speaks Project: I Got You" Type on Mirror, 24x30

"God Speaks Project: I Got You" Type on Mirror, 24x30

God Speaks is a broader body of work built from fragments, questions, and borrowed voices. At its center is a simple and unsettling act: writing notes from God. The project deliberately walks the line between prophecy and heresy—not to claim authority, but to expose how authority is constructed. Who am I to write the words of God? That question is the work.
Rather than presenting divine speech as fixed or singular, the project asks who is allowed to author the sacred, who is believed, and who is excluded from the canon. I moved through communities asking people a simple question: Have you ever had an experience with God? Their responses—hesitant, poetic, contradictory, ordinary—became the source material. I transcribed their words and shaped them into short gathas, poems, and proverbs.
In this way, God Speaks is less about revelation and more about listening. It treats divinity as something distributed—arriving through memory, doubt, grief, humor, and lived experience. The work does not attempt to define God, but to hold space for the possibility that the sacred has always been speaking, just not through a single voice.

Be Who You Want to Be, Neon Sign

God Speak Project: I See You, Acrylic on canvas

You Are Gold, Gold Leaf & Acrylic on Canvas

Patience, Gold Leaf & Acrylic on Canvas

Pay Bills And Die, Gold Leaf and Acrylic on Canvas

Just As You Are, Acrylic on Canvas

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