LOCKOLAND Europe showcases the work of made for his European art tour. In twelve paintings Locko has produced amidst his stay in Paris, France, the artist’s signature style of free-handed portraits—a single line of level eyes connected by a nose’s bridge, together forming a T shape—continue to serve as the centerpiece for increasingly-personal explorations into the contemporary conditions of subjectivity. Here, Locko has developed his abstracted self-portraits to narrate the historically fraught relationship between Blackness and portraiture. Works such as The Lockadooks explore if and how Locko can reclaim the likeness of racist caricatures into his practice, while his faces in The Niggerbread Man cheer on the assumedly Black protagonist as he outruns perhaps inescapable danger. And despite the distance between France and the United States of America, these works, including The United States of Locko: A Letter to America, become reflections on the daily challenges and performances of being Black in America.

Here Locko has fashioned lines of thought which tangle issues of be-longing, dignity, and discovery between the realms of artistic representation and lived experience. The Lockadooks are a way for me to reclaim the power of depicting Black Americans from the hands of historic oppressors who created Black caricatures in the 1920s and 30s. They blend portraiture, caricature, and beauty into a multitude of likenesses.