“I think that good art requires tension,” says multidisciplinary artist and ‘performance athlete’ Thelonius Stokes. “It's like a cigarette with no filter. I want it to hit the bloodstream immediately.”

In a way, Stokes has built his career on tension. On one level, there is the political and racial tension invoked by his controversial performance art pieces; on another level, the tension between his personal subjectivity as a Black man from the South Side of Chicago and his classical European artistic training, and the connotations of the instruments and mediums he chooses. Above it all hangs the meta-analytical tension between the traditional mechanisms of art world institutions and the increasingly alienated public audiences they are failing to reach.

Currently based in Florence, Italy, where he’s lived for nearly a decade, Stokes has amassed over 200,000 followers and millions of views for his unannounced and highly provocative performance art pieces that he records and posts online. Incorporating the involuntary participation of members of the public in recognizable tourist hotspots around the world as they react to his durational performances, his work invites the viewer to interrogate the publics’ organic responses to the most extreme signifiers of “Blackness” through live-action, real time caricature as he snarls and growls in full blackface. In addition to his performances, Stokes has found another viral niche in subversively depicting Black figures in classical styles in his paintings, such as his well-known speculative “"Post Mortem Portrait of Emmett and Louis Till” (2021).

”For my work to be so popular right now,” Stokes says carefully, “I think it's a testament to the times. It could be considered unhealthy, but I can say it’s a socially nude moment where histories are being stripped back.” In his view, virality is just one component of how his work seeks to examine “what a human spectacle can be.”

At a time when fine art sales are significantly diminishing in both the first- and second-hand markets, feebly sanitized and inaccessibly academic art about race still makes up the bulk of the political art that mainstream venues have to offer. By contrast, Stokes’ work meets the public where they already are, both physically and in terms of the symbols they can already recognize, and it makes no attempt to package itself for art critics or curators. Once asked if he ever intended to pursue formal gallery representation, Stokes replied, “God is my gallery.” To him, the art world’s relevance might be dying, but resurrecting and reanimating some of its oldest and most revered codes is still a worthwhile pursuit. “It’s my goal to disrupt these false flags that certain cultures have adopted a monopoly on,” he says. ”To kind of mix it up, shred it, strain it out, and see what that pure juice is that remains.”

Stokes discovered oil painting after he dropped out of high school at the age of 16, frustrated with the substandard instruction and excessive violence he found himself surrounded by in the Chicago public education system. “I didn't really feel like going to school,” he tells me. “To be honest with you, I felt like I wasn't really learning anything.” Named after Thelonius Munk, the then-teen was raised by musician parents and consistently exposed to art forms from live theater to his jazz vocalist mother’s studio sessions and his rock-and-roller father’s spontaneous jam sessions. Suddenly unoccupied during the weekdays for the first time, he passed the hours at the Art Institute of Chicago while he waited for his friends to get out of school, absorbing the works of Francis Bacon, Picasso, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt.

One night shortly after dropping out, he attended a house party on the North Side for his friend Fatimah’s 17th birthday. “We get to this massive loft, walking up these large stairs,” he recalls. “There were all these oil paintings everywhere. It must have been a hundred teenagers there, but for me, the room went silent, and all I could do was look at these beautiful paintings just kissing this loft everywhere. I was in a daze.” Later that night, “this white guy walks up to me in a full tuxedo,” he describes. “I asked him, ‘Do you know who made the paintings in this place?’ and he says, ‘I did.’” Meeting Ryan Shultz, a lifelong painter and prolific teacher, felt like kismet. He asked Shultz to teach him how to paint, and the next morning, he was back in the loft attending his first lesson while remnants of the party were still being cleaned up around him. After a few years of study, Stokes was already discovering the subterranean current of captivation with his work on the Internet that would prove to propel his career, selling paintings to collectors that discovered him on social media in his early twenties. The final piece of instrumental guidance he received from Shultz, who passed away at the age of 36 in late 2023, was that he’d taught him all he could. Shultz told him to apply to his alma mater, the Florence Academy of Art.

At first, Stokes preferred to only perform spontaneously. But as time has gone on, the now 30 year old has revised that clause in his artist’s statement, allowing the part of his artistic philosophy that detests traditional PR events and gallery openings to be overpowered by the part that embraces the potential of those spaces to reach people in our day and age. This month, Stokes delivered his first ever pre-announced performance at 66 Greene, playing the harp interspersed with live vocals for an entranced wallto- wall audience.

Despite having sworn off mainstream art institutions early in his career, Stokes is now preparing for his first museum show in 2027 in Australia, embracing the contradiction between his disbelief in the industry and his conviction in taking his practice to the next level. The enthusiastic response to his work that he’s encountered from strangers approaching him in public all around the world has chipped away at some of his disillusionment. “Okay, there's an embrace here,” he says he realized. “There's a community. It feels like I’ve come home.”