In her stunning first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, international and award-winning artist Kokeb has captured on canvas what we know deep in our hearts: beautiful Black faces, each immersed in their own serene gazes, adorned with sunflowers and marigolds, some looking straight at us, others immersed in a tenderness so pure, it almost feels like an intrusion to look at them.

Kokeb, who often paints in response to poetry collections, has long preferred to depict Black figures who seem to possess the kind of knowing that we don’t. Their serenity seems to come exactly from that, and they look, and look, and look, unbothered, bejeweled, at times bursting from an explosion of hues, other times captured in dimmed, intimate moments.

The current show, Within the Black Frame, I Find contains several earlier pieces, including work commissioned through different poetry collections.

Kokeb is a multimedia artist from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Los Angeles and Bay Area California. Her work seeks to reframe, sometimes quite literally, Black beauty and Black multiplicity through art and a social justice lens. Her notable mural, the roads we’ve been, has been transmuted through music and performance art by Spleen. Kokeb is often inspired by poetry and will paint in response to a collection of poems, or a body of work. Several of her paintings have been featured on book covers of such poetry books, and bodies of work and has exhibited her work internationally.  She lives in the Bay area with her family and houseplants.

On view at Anaphora Arts DTLA Arts Space now through March 2024.

Flowers in dark rooms by Kokeb