Prehistoric Gold is Black
Xavier Raymond Kelley
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 16 | 5:30-8:000 PM
Show Dates: January 16 - March 5, 2027; open by appointment.
Xavier Raymond Kelley returns to Weedman Design Partners with Prehistoric Gold is Black, a survey of his newest studio work. Two years after his first show at the gallery, the scope of his practice has grown considerably. Paintings remain at the center, still charged with the saturated color, glyphs, and layered symbolism that define his work. Around them, sculpture and found objects carry that same visual language into new forms, letting it move off the canvas and take up space in the room.
Those two years have taken Kelley well beyond the studio. A collaboration with Jordan Brand and an exhibition in China have expanded both his audience and his sense of what his work can do. This show reflects that growth. It feels less like a single body of work and more like a map of where his ideas are traveling.
At the heart of the exhibition is a question Kelley has been working through: how to talk about Black art without isolating the artists who make it. His answer is a term of his own, “Afro Post-Tribal Urbanism.” The phrase names a genre rather than an identity. It points to a shared urban, Afro-diasporic, and multicultural experience, one that gives rise to work as immediate and charged as his own, and that connects him to a lineage including Basquiat rather than setting either of them apart. In Kelley’s words, “It’s not about us being black artists, it’s the styles, genres, and techniques we’re working with as black artists.”
About the Artist
Xavier Raymond Kelley is a painter from Seattle’s Central District. Informed by Afrofuturism and graffiti art, his work reimagines past histories through highly saturated figures and glyphs, drawing on ancient iconography, sports, music, Black culture, and art history. A longtime athlete, Kelley often uses sport as a metaphor for how marginalized people have to maneuver through society to move upward. He also comes from a deeply musical family. His great-grandmother was the Seattle jazz pianist Ruby Bishop. His work has appeared on the cover of Elle Decor, has been exhibited widely in Seattle and New York, and is held in private collections across the country. We hope you’ll join us for the opening and experience the work in person.
