Felandus Thames is bringing overlooked lives into focus through portraits assembled from thousands of brightly colored hair beads, transforming a familiar object from Black childhood and hairstyling culture into a monumental medium for history, memory and public inquiry.

The Mississippi-born, Connecticut-based artist uses plastic beads strung on coated wire and suspended from aluminum supports. Viewed from a distance, the strands resolve into recognizable faces. Up close, the portraits break apart into individual units of color, pattern and texture. That shift between image and material is central to Thames’s goal: prompting viewers to look longer, ask who they are seeing and consider why certain people remain unfamiliar.

Recent coverage of Thames’s practice has highlighted his interest in creating curiosity rather than directing audiences toward a predetermined conclusion. He has said that he prefers viewers to bring their own experiences to the work and develop an individual dialogue with it. His portraits are therefore constructed with multiple points of entry—through color, biography, personal memory, material culture and the larger histories of the Black diaspora.

Thames arrived at hair beads as a signature material after examining the objects associated with his adolescence. He was searching for materials that possessed emotional and social value while allowing him to return to portraiture, one of his earliest artistic impulses. Beads offered a solution because they could function visually like pixels while retaining cultural associations that a conventional painted mark would not carry.

The material evokes beauty-supply stores, family rituals and the sound and movement of beaded hairstyles. It also recalls the beaded curtains and domestic objects Thames encountered growing up. By moving those inexpensive, mass-produced objects into museums and galleries, he asks viewers to reconsider how cultural value is assigned and which materials are treated as worthy of serious attention.

His method sits between drawing, sculpture, weaving and installation. The strands possess a fabric-like quality, but they also cast shadows and occupy physical space. Their openness allows portions of the wall behind them to remain visible, giving the portraits a sense of movement and instability. A face can appear solid from one angle and fragmented from another.

Thames does not follow one fixed production formula. Color theory and composition guide the early stages, while museum collections, tapestries, paintings, fashion and popular media provide sources for patterns. He makes preliminary studies but leaves room for improvisation, and works can change substantially as he responds to the relationships developing among the beads.

Historical photographs often provide the starting image. Among Thames’s recent subjects is Alvin Ailey, the influential dancer and choreographer who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and expanded the place of Black experience within American concert dance. In “Let’s Dance, Ailey,” the performer’s likeness emerges from vertical rows of beads surrounded by energetic color and pattern.

Another portrait honors Dorie Ladner, the Mississippi civil rights organizer who participated in voter-registration campaigns and challenged segregation. Thames’s “She Did What She Could” presents Ladner not as a distant historical symbol but as an individual whose presence must be encountered directly. The title underscores the cumulative power of people whose contributions may be compressed or omitted in familiar accounts of the civil rights movement.

“Wail on Whalers,” a portrait of Amos Haskins, expands the project beyond better-known cultural and political figures. Haskins was a 19th-century Wampanoag mariner whose life connects Indigenous history with the maritime economy. The work was created in connection with the Mystic Seaport Museum’s examination of Black and Indigenous perspectives on the sea, including the ways maritime labor could offer mobility or autonomy within a society shaped by enslavement and dispossession.

Other portraits refer to people whose identities are uncertain or incompletely documented. “Believed to be Jenny Freeman in Her Sunday’s Best,” for example, signals the limits of the archive in its title. The qualification becomes part of the work, acknowledging how historical records can preserve an image while failing to provide a full name, biography or account of the person depicted.

That tension between visibility and erasure runs through Thames’s wider practice. He has worked with hairbrushes, beard brushes, shoelaces, sneakers and other culturally charged objects, selecting materials for the histories and associations they bring with them. His installations frequently address Black identity, masculinity, racial violence, economic pressure and the systems that determine who is seen, remembered or valued.

Thames’s intellectual framework includes the Black Radical Tradition, particularly ideas associated with scholar Cedric Robinson. Rather than treating resistance as a sequence of isolated events, that tradition considers a broader historical consciousness shaped through opposition to racial capitalism, imperial power and other systems of domination. Thames translates those questions into material and visual terms without turning the portraits into illustrations of a single theory.

His work is currently reaching Midwestern audiences through “Joyful Resistance” at the Peoria Riverfront Museum in Illinois. The exhibition brings together work by Black American artists, writers and designers across generations, emphasizing creativity and agency alongside the histories of oppression that have shaped Black life in the United States.

The museum hosted Thames for a public conversation and exhibition tour on July 12 as part of its free Access for All programming. Visitors were invited to hear him discuss his process and then encounter the work within the gallery. The program connected his material choices with the exhibition’s wider attention to everyday objects—including hair-care products, soap and fabric—as expressions of culture rather than incidental details.

“Joyful Resistance” is part of the Peoria institution’s programming around the 250th anniversary of the United States. That context gives Thames’s historical portraits additional significance. As museums prepare exhibitions about the country’s founding and development, his work presses a fundamental question: Which lives and forms of cultural production are included when institutions tell an American story?

Thames’s approach avoids replacing one simplified narrative with another. His portraits reward both immediate visual recognition and slower investigation. A viewer may first be attracted by the bright beads, then notice a name, search for the subject’s biography or recognize associations with hair, family and childhood. Curiosity becomes a way of restoring complexity to people who have often been reduced to footnotes or excluded altogether.

The works also challenge distinctions between fine art and craft. Beads have long histories in adornment, trade, spirituality and community traditions, yet beadwork and other labor-intensive practices have frequently been separated from the institutional category of major art. Thames uses the scale and formal authority of portraiture while preserving the medium’s intimate cultural references.

That combination is what gives the portraits their force. They are visually accessible but historically layered, personal but connected to collective experience. Thames does not require viewers to arrive with specialized knowledge. He offers the face, the material and the pattern, then leaves space for questions—about the subject, the archive, the artist’s memories and the histories that continue to shape American life.