OPENING RECEPTION: SAT FEBRUARY 8th, 2025.(5-8pm) w/ ARTIST TALK @ 6PM
ARTIST MEET & GREET SAT MARCH 8th (3-5pm)
CLOSING RECEPTION & ARTIST TALK THURS MARCH 20TH (7-9PM)
Exhibit Featured February 8th – March 22nd 2025

Curator Statement

Marcus Guillory: ABRACADABRA
For more than two decades, Marcus Guillory has masterfully navigated the art of storytelling across diverse mediums—film, television, literature, and music. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Red Now and Laters, received a starred review from Kirkus and was shortlisted for the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, while his screenplay Gully premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, cementing his reputation as a storyteller of extraordinary depth and resonance.

In 2023, Guillory returned to his birthplace, Houston, to expand his narrative pursuits into the realm of visual art. Within the intimate creative environment of curator Robert Hodge’s private studio, Guillory began to reimagine text as a visual medium, exploring how language could transcend its written form to become tactile, immersive, and experiential.

ABRACADABRA, Guillory’s debut exhibition, represents the culmination of this transformative journey—a deeply conceptual exploration of text-based art where language serves as both medium and message. Using oil sticks on paper and wood panels, layered with stenciled lettering and deliberate imperfections, Guillory’s work captures the rawness, urgency, and transgressive power of human expression. His typographic compositions interrogate the complexities of belief, identity, and shared moments, creating spaces that invite introspection and evoke a sense of “otherness.”

Each piece in this body of work vibrates with profound meaning, disrupting traditional boundaries between narrative and aesthetics. Through his innovative interplay of words and form, Guillory redefines storytelling as a visceral, multidimensional art form.

It is only fitting that this landmark exhibition unfolds in Los Angeles—a city that mirrors Guillory’s creative trajectory with its layered histories, dynamic energy, and ongoing dialogue between the past and future. Curated by Robert Leroy Hodge, ABRACADABRA is not merely an exhibition—it is a testament to Guillory’s visionary approach and the boundless possibilities of narrative as art.

Robert Hodge

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Marcus John Guillory
Multidisciplinary Artist

About My Work:
For the past twenty years I have actively worked as a writer for film, television, literature and essay in Los Angeles, California (with the bulk of my practice in narrative fiction). In 2012, while producing my first album “Postcards From Strangers” on Osunlade’s Yoruba Records (where I combined spoken prose with house music), I started to develop my writing practice into text-based visual art with the intention of bringing evocative messaging and story-telling that I’d utilized in other disciplines.

My paintings are flashes of stories, images, beliefs and behaviors. Lives and Life. All translatable through typography, colors and composition. My practice explores the human necessity to be understood clearly and succinctly in past, present and speculative future through narratives, moments and utterances, utilizing text art as speech act; an intercourse of typography, pragmatics, narrative and aesthetics – where what is said is as important as how it’s said.

I primarily use oil sticks on paper and wood panels, which creates smudges that evoke a sense of urgency or taboo – something underground or non-sanctioned. I use stencils for lettering; applied letter for letter, aligned/unaligned, personal yet removed. Occasionally I employ parentheticals to create a dialogue or counter message within the work.

My work seeks direct engagement with the viewers’ cognitive mechanics. I want the viewer to read and understand. I’m interested in personal moments that evoke “otherness” (supernatural, existential) and/or reflection. The narratives are designed to allow the viewer to be the subject or the observer; a choice each viewer makes subconsciously based on identifying with the narrative and its meaning.

BIO
Marcus John Guillory (b. Houston, Texas, based in Los Angeles, California) works in text-based conceptual art that utilizes intimate human narratives to engage the viewer. He’s a 2016 Sundance Screenwriters Lab Fellow for his screenplay “Gully”, which premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Fest. He is a PEN/Faulkner Reading Series lecturer. His debut novel “Red Now and Laters” (Atria/Simon & Schuster) was short-listed for the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, received a starred Kirkus Review and was adapted by Warner Brothers Television. His extensive writing/producing credits in television include such shows as Fox’s “Empire”, Marvel’s “Cloak & Dagger”, BET’s “Sacrifice”, NBC’s “Law & Order: Organized Crime”, Paramount’s “Tulsa King” and many more. He graduated from Jesse J. Jones Sr. High in Houston, Texas and received a BA in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from Tulane Law School.