February 22 – March 30, 2025
Gallery Route One Fellow Zulu Heru shows scrap metal Afrocentric masks and sculptures—ritualistic objects that tell stories of urban environments with an ancestral aspect. The mask Lazer Cut announces Interstate and wears street signs for a hat; his spirit is about setting an intention and staying focused. In other works, body parts are made from repurposed propane tanks, tractor blades, shells from anti-tank helicopter rounds, and tracks of an M1A1 Abrams tank.
Heru first gained metal skills while doing shop chores for Afrofuturist metal sculptor Uzikee Nelson. Now a master builder and engineer, he’s built giant sculptures for Burning Man.
I’m not intimidated by materials. American construction is built off centuries of the work of Black people, everything found in manufacturing and industrial materials. My skills are a result of ancestral privilege. When I touch these materials, I touch the story of my ancestors, the people who made the prototype of this item, and the materials are still speaking to me now.
Like his mentor Uzikee, Heru merges African aesthetics with contemporary art,honoring the religious and medicinal aspects of the African. Heru is a war veteran; he began designing sculpture to heal from PSTD, and soon realized he was speaking for a community.
I was becoming a culture bearer with a responsibility to speak for people. I know people who worked in the trades for fifty years and they are invisible. I want to make faces, to identify people that carry the lineage of building this country. After 400 years of slavery and the diaspora… I still have my core DNA culture to make this.
