Nehemiah Cisneros

Poignant and complex paintings by artist Nehemiah Cisneros.

Cisneros creates richly layered narrative paintings that chronicle the intertwined histories of Los Angeles. Drawing inspiration from the collectibles that once filled his family’s Inglewood shop, he blends historical and fictional imagery rooted in Black Americana. His compositions pull from an eclectic range of sources—1970s Blaxploitation films, manga, outsider art, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and the surrealist collages of Max Ernst—bringing them into surprising, thought-provoking visual dialogues.

Often monumental in scale, Cisneros’s immersive canvases reveal the cultural and class divisions shaped by the media we consume. By mixing disparate visual languages, he challenges traditional art-historical narratives and proposes a more inclusive, revisionist view of the canon, one that acknowledges the complex, overlapping influences that define contemporary life.