Felandus Thames USA, b. 1974

Felandus Thames’s practice explores the relationship between material, memory, and image-making. Through sculpture, assemblage, and installation, Thames transforms familiar objects—including basketball hoops, hairbrushes, plastic beads, and other everyday materials—into vessels that carry personal, cultural, and historical associations. His works consider how materials accumulate meaning over time, becoming repositories of memory, experience, and collective narratives. Working through processes of accumulation, repetition, and transformation, Thames allows his materials to become active participants in the construction of meaning. In one body of work, he uses the bristles of brushes designed for Afro-textured hair to create text-based compositions that incorporate phrases from cultural figures such as Richard Pryor and James Brown. These works transform objects associated with care, grooming, and identity into carriers of language, rhythm, and cultural memory. In his ongoing series of beaded portraits, Thames strings thousands of plastic hair beads into large-scale suspended compositions that exist between portraiture and abstraction. Using beads as visual building blocks, he creates intricate images that reflect on the relationship between material, history, and representation. The works draw attention to the expressive possibilities of everyday materials, revealing how objects connected to personal experience can also hold broader cultural significance. Across his practice, Thames investigates the balance between beauty, complexity, and lived experience, creating what he describes as “vessels able to contain beauty and trauma at an equilibrium.” His works function similarly to Black music, which he describes as being “endowed by, but not the sum of, Black joy, pain, and suffering”—a framework that reflects his interest in creating objects that hold multiple histories and emotions simultaneously.

Thames' work has been exhibited at major institutions nationally and internationally including in The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined at the Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy (2022); The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Contemporary Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2021–2023); Get in the Game, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Perez Art Museum of Miami (2024–2026), as well as at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, the African American Museum of Philadelphia, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the National Civil Rights Museum, and Mystic Seaport Museum, among others. His work is held in numerous public and esteemed private collections, including the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Mississippi Museum of Art. In 2025, Thames was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Prize.