"ACTS OF CLEANSING, REVELATION, AND DEPARTURE"
Zakee Kuduro is a Philadelphia-born, South America–based multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, film, and sound. His work investigates identity, mortality, spirituality, and cultural memory—particularly through the lens of the American and Black experience. His visual language is quiet yet potent, often grounded in emotional stillness and philosophical inquiry. All of his creative output lives within a larger, evolving body of work titled "All Sinners Have Souls."
Zakee’s path into painting began when he modeled for Amy Sherald’s acclaimed portrait Pilgrimage of the Chameleon. Witnessing her methodical, spiritually charged process became a catalyst, opening a new dimension of introspection and visual storytelling. The experience echoed an earlier formative moment: as a child, during his father’s brief incarceration, Zakee was placed in the care of legendary painter Barkley L. Hendricks. Spending a week in Hendricks’ studio, he watched him create elegant portraits of Black subjects—unaware of Hendricks’ artistic stature but intuitively sensing the sacredness of the work. Recognizing Zakee’s early potential, Hendricks later encouraged his parents to enroll him at the Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philadelphia and helped him secure his first summer job as a lifeguard and water safety instructor at Sayre Recreation Center in West Philadelphia—a foundational act of mentorship that nurtured his independence.
Raised in Southwest Philly, Zakee’s earliest encounters with ritual and the human form came while working at his uncle’s funeral home. Though he earned degrees in Mathematics and Computer Engineering from Howard University and later pursued doctoral studies in pharmacy, his creative path remained ever-present—leading him through music, photography, and filmmaking before ultimately returning to painting.
Since that return, Zakee has developed a powerful body of visual work centered on faith, mortality, Black identity, and spiritual quietude—primarily through oil on canvas, sculpture, and mixed media. In 2022, he was commissioned by the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro to produce a multi-channel video installation. That same year, he became the final assistant to celebrated Brazilian painter Sebastião Januário, helping complete the artist’s final works and filming him until his death in 2025. Zakee also co-produced Januário’s first solo exhibition in 24 years, Cores para Esquecer, which featured 11 never-before-seen works painted by Zakee under his mentor’s guidance. His debut preview show at Art Rio 2023—featuring 12 paintings, 6 sketches, and an audio installation—sold out to international collectors.
Outside the visual arts, Zakee is a two-time Gold Lovie Award–winning filmmaker (Brazil’s Gangs Fighting COVID-19), composer (Assimilations, named an MTV Iggy Top 20 Debut Album), and scored the indie film Yelling to the Sky (dir.Victoria Mahoney, starring Zoë Kravitz and Gabourey Sidibe). From 2003 to 2009, he served as Senior FARM Rep at The FADER / Cornerstone Promotions, contributing to campaigns for M.I.A., Gnarls Barkley, and Santigold. He later worked as Creative Director for Energy Action Coalition, producing the landmark climate summits Power Shift 2011 in Washington, D.C., and Power Shift 2013 in Pittsburgh—the first held outside the capital.
Zakee has produced film work for the BBC, National Geographic, and others. Now living in South America with his family, he continues to build a practice rooted in memory, legacy, and spiritual inquiry. Whether through canvas, sound, or lens, "All Sinners Have Souls" invites audiences to slow down, look inward, and witness the
unseen dimensions of Black identity and human experience.
My practice begins in stillness.
I am drawn to the spaces that hover between presence and absence, the known and the invisible. My work emerges from an ongoing search for spiritual resonance within the fractured mirrors of memory, identity, and personal inheritance. Though I work across disciplines—painting, sculpture, film, and sound—they are not separate languages but rather interconnected rituals. Each medium becomes a vessel, a means to map interior landscapes shaped by faith, loss, transformation, and quiet endurance.
I do not seek to document what is visible. I aim to conjure what is felt but unseen.
Much of my creative inquiry is rooted in tension—between sacred and profane, silence and sound, permanence and decay. I am interested in how memory shows up in contemporary form, how absence lingers in the body, and how the interior life can be rendered without spectacle. My materials often carry the weight of contradiction: oil paint applied with tenderness to portray existential rupture, or sculpture that feels both fossil and future.
Rather than offer conclusions, I see each work as a question, a meditation, or a confession. Together, they form a larger spiritual architecture—All Sinners Have Souls—an evolving cosmos of artifacts that invite reflection, humility, and witnessing. I hope those who encounter the work feel both seen and unsettled, affirmed and undone.
At its core, my practice is devotional. Not to dogma, but to the unseen forces that shape our lives and legacies. The canvas is my altar. The work is the prayer.
