From thousands of colorful hair beads, Felandus Thames conjures vibrant patterns and portraits. He takes historical photographs as a starting point, focusing especially on Black and Indigenous figures whose stories have largely been underrepresented in American historical narrative. These include dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey and Amos Haskins, a 19th-century Wampanoag man who became a master mariner—one of the few Indigenous people to do so.
Based in West Haven, Connecticut, Thames emphasizes powerful associations with materials. In the case of these portraits, he employs beads frequently used to style braids. Recent projects also include installations incorporating multiple hairbrushes. “Lately, I’ve been thinking about the affordances of material and their ability to necessitate an idea,” Thames tells Colossal. “I’ve been mining materials from my childhood,” he adds, delving into memories that connect him and others within the Black diaspora.
These materials reference both historical and contemporary functions, from the use of beads and shells as currency in early societies to the way a beaded curtain was separated different areas within Thames’ childhood home. “In these works, I offer the everyday as cultural currency,” he says.
Thames describes the mass-produced plastic components as “Black pixels,” akin to pieces of fabric patchworked together to form a quilt. A creative practice his maternal ancestors also pursued, quilting provides another “way of speaking to how carry memory with us,” he says. The neatly beaded strands, suspended from aluminum rods, also become almost fabric-like.
In his recent work, Thames has been interested in the Black radical tradition, a philosophy that rejects colonial attitudes, such as slavery, racial segregation, and other forms of oppression. The Black Panthers and the civil rights movement evolved around this philosophy, with more recent examples including the Black Lives Matter movement.
For Thames, Black radical tradition is “a form of resistance and insurgency” by people who took great leaps and made lasting change. “My focus gets beyond the outlier or exceptional individual, but thinking about people who have fostered sustainable change to the apparatus,” he says.
Thames’ portraits exemplify changes or behavior that created something akin to what he calls a “scaffolding for substantive change.” Surrounded by vibrant patterns, their likenesses, often drawn from black-and-white archival photos, become timeless.
“Wail on Whalers (portrait of Amos Haskin)” is currently part of Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea, which continues through January 19 at the Mystic Seaport Museum. Thames’ work is also currently on view in the group exhibition EXODUS at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, which continues through April 18, 2026. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
