Who Will Protect Us?

Artist statement

Each work a protective spell, adorned with one of the Odu Mejis of the Yoruba Sacred Tradition Ifa. Each work a piece of spiritual protection to my loved ones. This work is meant to protect Black women. To provide the protection we are often denied. Through this work I have infused the life force of Oya. The Orisha I am initiated into. Through this work we make right all the wrongs and harms that Black women have faced.

About the artist

Patrisse Cullors is an artist, author, and abolitionist from Los Angeles whose work asks what it takes for people to live in their full humanity. A co-founder of Black Lives Matter and former executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, she has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of art, organizing, and healing.

Cullors’s path began close to home. Her family’s experience with incarceration and her brother’s treatment in Los Angeles County jails inspired her performance work and led her to found Dignity & Power Now. She went on to help build and lead Reform LA Jails and Justice LA.

Her practice spans performance, textiles, mixed media, and public activations, and is grounded in Ifá, the Yoruba spiritual tradition she has practiced for more than 20 years. Through what she calls abolitionist aesthetics, she creates spaces and objects that give form to care, love, and protection. Her work has been presented at LACMA, The Broad, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Hammer Museum, and Frieze Los Angeles.

Cullors is the inaugural Visiting Senior Fellow and Artist-Healer in residence with the HEARTS Program at the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, a six-month residency that began in July 2026. She previously served as artist and healer in residence at the Skirball Cultural Center, where she led Bridging Histories: Black-Jewish Dialogues for Peace and Unity- a year long program of shared meals, meditative traditions, readings, and dialogue. Her latest museum exhibition, Wishes Made Material, is a culmination of that year long experiment. The exhibition is an installation of textiles, video, and sound on view at the Skirball Cultural Center through February 28, 2027.

Cullors holds an MFA from the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She co-founded Crenshaw Dairy Mart, an artist collective and gallery in Inglewood, and founded the Social and Environmental Arts Practice MFA at Prescott College. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller When They Call You a Terrorist and An Abolitionist’s Handbook. Her newest book is We Make the World: Guided Aesthetics Practices for Art, Power and Healing.