In Conversation: Tariku Shiferaw and Dhyandra Lawson

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce our Spotlight presentation of works by New York-based artist Tariku Shiferaw. Titled Defiant Imaginations, this focused presentation of three new paintings reflect on the artist’s creative output as a tool of resistance and defiance. The works will be on view from October 11th to November 15th, 2025, and the gallery will host a conversation between Tariku Shiferaw and curator Dhyandra Lawson on October 25th at 3pm, with a reception to follow.

Shiferaw’s recent paintings use mark-making as a means to layer and superimpose intangible ideas with imprints of physical actions and objects culled from varied histories and lineages. The use of translucent materials overlayed with bold, graphic bars and grid patterns creates a dynamic interplay between presence and absence, exposure and obfuscation, surface and the illusion of depth.

The painting Tezeta (Mulatu Astatke) refers to a song by the Ethiopian jazz musician, and is part of a series of works that borrow their titles from music of the African diaspora, drawing on source materials from beyond the boundaries of a Eurocentric canon. In the titular work, Defiant Imaginations, a lustrous semitransparent layer of midnight blue covers all but a small, window-like square near the center of the painting, where vivid colors and gestural strokes radiate through the lattice of an opaque grid. For Shiferaw, the grid is both a nod to the visual language of abstraction and its history in modern art, and a metaphor for the systems and structures imposed on us at the societal level.

Part of Shiferaw’s Mata Semay (meaning “night skies” in Amharic) series, this painting is suffused with the rich hues of the night sky, a vast space of myth-making, constellations, and cultural projections of meaning. The connotation of the sky invites the viewer to consider more expansive ways of looking, beyond what can be neatly mapped out or contained within a grid. Another work in this series, There Are Other Suns, incorporates a small Dogon brass representation of the sun against a yellow background. Its varying depths and textures, which include iridescent film, mylar, wood, and cloth, shift in and out of visibility depending on the angle from which the work is viewed. Shiferaw’s title riffs on a common phrase to expand our understanding beyond a singular, often Western lens, and embraces a multiplicity of perspectives without limitation.

Tariku Shiferaw (b. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is a New York-based artist who explores the concept of ‘mark-making’ to address the physical, social, and political spaces of art and societal constructs. A select list of institutions where Shiferaw has exhibited includes the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, The Drawing Center (NY), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Germany), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, California African American Museum, Zuckerman Museum of Art (GA), Museum of the African Diaspora (CA), and Smack Mellon (NY).

Shiferaw has participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in Open Sessions at The Drawing Center. He has also been an artist-in-residence at the LES Studio Program, Silver Art Projects, ARCAthens (Greece), Experimental Print Residency at Lafayette College, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Hermitage Artist Fellowship. In 2026 he will participate in the Joyner/Giuffrida Visiting Artist Program at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV. He is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York, NY.

Dhyandra Lawson is the Andy Song Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She co-curated the LACMA exhibitions Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall and Vincent Valdez and Ry Cooder: El Chavez Ravine in 2023. She has also organized the exhibition and publication Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st Century Art and Poetics, which opened last year and is currently on view.

Previously Lawson was assistant curator of photography at LACMA where she organized the exhibitions Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland and Contemporary Works from LACMA (2022) and Eleanor Antin: Time’s Arrow (2019). Her recent published contributions include writing in Black American Portraits (2022) and Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising (2022). Throughout Lawson’s tenure at LACMA, she has dedicated her acquisitions and exhibitions to bringing attention to emerging and historically underrepresented artists and expanding LACMA’s collection of global contemporary art.

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