Felandus Thames Wants to Spark Curiosity with His Beaded Portraits

A shrine to Black cultural scripts stands in West Haven, Connecticut, a short ride from Union Station. It isn’t an official monument of any kind, but the studio of Felandus Thames, who has been based in the Constitution State since 2008.  

During a visit in March, the two-room space served as the temporary home to Thames’s latest beaded curtain portraits of notable Black luminaries, which lay on tables awaiting completion. One of his earlier works, a green beaded curtain with the word “pleasure” spelled out in orange like a Newport cigarette ad, hung on a stand, a portent of the magic to appear in the impending works.

Lining the walls, on more permanent display, were several of his hairbrush sculptures, inscribed with maxims drawn from his own poems or that of Black poets he admires. In a corner of his studio, Thames displayed his “ghetto blaster,” a large portable radio popular in the 1980s for blaring music in urban settings, and a vintage 40-ounce bottle of Colt 45 malt liquor that he plans to get signed by actor Billy Dee Williams. The studio is a comfortable place, rich with history and the everyday objects of Black Americans.

Though his studio is neatly organized, Thames admits his studio is in his head. “I will find ways to work because I’m obsessed with making things,” he said. One early piece, I’m Neutral (2010), he made on his dining room table for an exhibition at Kravets Wehby Gallery, gaining a mention in the New York Times for it.

Thames took part in the Tougaloo Art Colony, a weeklong retreat at Jackson’s Touglaoo College in 2001. While there, he struck up a conversation with artist Torkwase Dyson, who was there creating a small body of work for her MFA application to the Yale School of Art. After that interaction, Thames decided to take his art seriously. He first enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but the expense of the elite art school deterred him from finishing his degree there. He returned to Jackson, Mississippi, where he was born and raised, and attended Jackson State University, graduating in 2008. Thinking back to his exchange with Dyson, he decided to apply to Yale’s MFA program, earning his degree in 2010.

While studying at Yale, Thames had class with the noted art historian Robert Farris Thompson where Sarah Lewis, now a professor at Harvard University, was his teaching assistant. He attended lectures by the late cultural critic Greg Tate, noted sociologist Paul Gilroy, and famed filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles all on his first day. Visiting artists during his time there included Pope.L, George Condo, and Trenton Doyle Hancock, while the roster of visiting critics included Lyle Ashton Harris, Mickalene Thomas, and Caroll Dunham. He had five or six studio visits in one day on some days. “It was an incredibly exciting time,” he said.

Thames’s decision to stay in Connecticut is partly because being in the area allows him access to world class scholarship, lectures, and visiting academics at Yale. Moreover, “the artist community is robust across disciplines, and I am fortunate to have amazing friends and acquaintances here,” he said.

Now, Thames is featured in the inaugural Aldrich Decennial, which highlights the work of 40 artists living and working in Connecticut. Organized by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, chief curator Amy Smith-Stewart said the exhibition is meant to “take the temperature on what is happening locally” and has an every-ten-year model to match the pace of the art scene in Connecticut.

Smith-Stewart admitted that contemporary art museums outside major cities are often criticized for not paying attention to their local audience or the artists living and working in their communities, and she wants to remedy that. “You don’t have to be in New York, you don’t have to be in LA, you don’t have to be in Chicago to make something happen,” she said.

She has titled this edition “I Am What Is Around Me,” after a poem by Wallace Stevens, who lived in Hartford for 40 years and whose poetry was influenced by his life there. She conducted around 100 studio visits to realize the exhibition. What stood out in Thames’s work, she said, is the way he uses “materials [to] convey meaning and memory” and that he highlights “Black identities and histories that maybe are not well known or histories that deserve more attention.”

She included two of his beaded portraits in the show: She did what she could (Dorie Ladner), a portrait of a social worker and civil rights advocate who worked on voter registration, and Jubilee (Margaret Walker), a portrait of the author of the novel Jubilee, who taught Thames’s teachers at Jackson State University.

For Thames, the Decennial is a way to “lend visibility and exposure to many artists who do not have New York representation, creating a lifeline in a very pivotal moment in their career. Hopefully it will dissolve the myth that world-class art can’t be also local.”

Shedding light on underknown artists is also built into the Decennial’s framework, as one requirement is that included artists have never had a solo museum exhibition. That is also the case for Thames, who has been included in major traveling shows, like “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse,” which debuted at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2021, and “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture,” which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2024.

Since his MFA days at Yale, Thames has sourced his materials from the beauty supply stores, including durags and hairbrushes in earlier works, and, more recently, the beads often used to decorate the ends of Black girls’ braided hair. Thames also drew a connection to the beaded curtains, a staple of African American home decor since the 1970s, separating rooms as they hung in doorways, that he remembered from his Afrocentric parents’ home.

“I guess part of what I’m trying to express with the beaded curtains is connecting people back to memory,” he said. “I felt like the beaded curtain was a device that could speak to Black interiority and at the same time be a reference to Black liberation theology in the sense of pro-Blackness and also Black hair.”

Made in 2016, his first beaded portrait depicted Penny, the character portrayed by Janet Jackson on the ’70s TV show Good Times. He destroyed it shortly after because it wasn’t up to his standards. Two years later, in an attempt to prove to himself that he could make a portrait in beads, he returned to the medium, making a portrait of Anita Hill.

The labor that goes into Thames’s work—roughly 400 hours for a curtain measuring six feet by four feet—is part of the point. “People could look at [an artwork] as a whole and just think of it as a beautiful and arresting object and not think about the labor because of how well constructed it is. And then there’s this other pole of thinking that thinks there should be labor, that you have the hand of the artist in it,” he said.

But more than anything, Thames wants people to look at his beaded portraits and find joy in them—and perhaps they might spark interest in learning about their subject. “If they happen to read Margaret Walker or they trace Alvin Ailey or read Things Fall Apart,” he said, “that’s all I want them to do.”