When you eat something good, like really good, something so good your whole body goes quiet, that food isn’t just feeding you. It’s hitting your spirit.
A loud silence, as Reginald Sylvester II might call it.
Over the last decade, Reggie’s work has moved fluidly between gestural abstraction, industrial design, minimal sculpture, and painting. What hasn’t changed is his commitment to holding space for belief—for the idea that an artwork can move past this world and open another.
In his current exhibition at the newly inaugurated Limbo Museum in Accra, Ghana, hollow steel tube sculptures act as gateways inside an unfinished concrete structure, embedded in a lush green landscape. Paintings are tucked throughout the space. EPDM rubber is stretched, rigorously washed with pigment, and cut in curves that reveal aluminum supports beneath—echoing the contours of the sculptures themselves. The whole exhibition feels like a visual prayer: provisional, searching, perpetually unfinished. It is beautiful.
What’s especially striking about Reggie is his clarity. He’s unabashed about his spiritual commitments and about the role art can play in sustaining faith, meaning, and resilience. That kind of openness feels rare. Many artists—myself included—often camouflage spiritual concerns with irony, deflection, or jokes. Reggie doesn’t. He’s direct, clear-sighted, and deeply grounded. You feel it when you’re around him.
Ben Bowling once described his father Frank Bowling’s paintings as a kind of soul food. For Reggie, this idea has become something closer to a principle: art as nourishment, art as sustenance.
Join us on Tuesday, February 17th for a conversation that welcomes spirit in art, and embraces the loud silences.
