Phillip Loken
« The Calling: Hoodoo’s Communion With The Ancestors »
Biography:
Currently based in Mebane, North Carolina, Phillip Loken was born in Texas and has lived in various cities and towns across North Carolina since age four. His image-making practice is intimately tied to his lived experiences as an Afrikan man in the American South.
Loken's work has been exhibited nationally and he was recently awarded the 2024 Collections Award from The Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. In 2024, Loken exhibited work at the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, The Southeastern Center for Photography, in Lake City, South Carolina’s ArtFields 2024 Competition, and the Durham Art Guild’s Truist Gallery. In 2023, his work was part of the It Ain't All Black And White group exhibition at Raleigh, NC's Block Gallery during Click! Photography Festival, and the group exhibition Black and White: 2023 at Black Box Gallery in Portland, Oregon. In 2022, Loken participated in the Give Black Raleigh Her Flowers' exhibition at Anchorlight Gallery in Raleigh, N.C.. In 2021, Loken participated in the exhibition BLACK GAZE: Representation, Identity, and Expression at The Light Factory Photo Arts Center.
As a professional photographer, Loken has worked with a variety of organizations and companies, including the City of Raleigh, CreativeMornings, the North Carolina Museum of Art, NoirBnb, Special Olympics North Carolina, and Woodforest National Bank. His photographs have also been licensed for use by the Greater Raleigh Convention & Visitors Bureau, Verizon’s Go90 docuseries American Down Low, and Walter Magazine. Loken was featured in a documentary film, Creative NC: An Introspective Look at Creative Culture, which premiered in 2017 at the North Carolina Museum of History.
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The Calling: Hoodoo’s Communion With The Ancestors
After 13 years of developing his image-making practice, North Carolina based cultural worker and photographer Phillip Loken’s first solo exhibition, The Calling: Hoodoo’s Communion With The Ancestors, gives appreciation to those who no longer walk among us but remain present and near.
Through pigment-printed digital photographs on archival paper, this exhibition honors a Black spiritual tradition that has traveled and remained through generations of practitioners.
On April 13th, 2024, Loken documented and participated in The Calling, an inaugural Hoodoo Homecoming organized by the Twin Hoodoo Muthas Saint Xolani and Jeida K. Storey. Black Power, resistance, and liberation were summoned and realized by the 26 Black people dressed in white who gathered at the Eno River in Durham, North Carolina to be in community, commune with their ancestors, and practice traditional Afrikan and Black geographically-American spirituality.
In the words of Saint Xolani themself, "Hoodoo is a Black folk spiritual-medicinal tradition formed from the wisdom retained from the Atlantic slave trade and cultivated by Black-Americans and Afro-Diasporic peoples. It centers a Black person's humanity and wholeness. It reinforces their identity through the support of God, the ancestors, the land, and community."
There was laughter and tears, there was celebration, the ancestors were honored and time was escaped.
Loken received the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library 2024 Collections Award for this body of work, allowing the university to add a collection of prints from this series to their archive.
"During a moment we shared, Jeida blessed me with a message that I always subconsciously knew, but having it verbalized gave it a new strength. She told me with any image I make, any person I make images of, I am documenting the lineage of that African person as well.
That statement is in all bold at the front of my brain now whenever the shutter button on any of my cameras is pressed.
It feels amazing to know my ancestors are present, proud, and will continue to guide me.
All of my ancestors (as a direct descendant and communal descendant), especially the Maroons of Jamaica, stand strong beside me."
Some images from the series
