the calling: hoodoo's communion with the ancestors
(solo exhibition)
Delta Arts Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 2025
Photographer: Timothy Jeffers
After 13 years of developing his image-making practice, North Carolina based cultural worker and photographer Phillip Loken’s first solo exhibition, The Calling: Hoodoo’s Communion With The Ancestors, gives appreciation to those who no longer walk among us but remain present and near.
Through pigment-printed digital photographs on archival paper and quotes from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1931 article Hoodoo In America this exhibition honors a Black spiritual tradition that has traveled and remained through generations of practitioners.
On April 13th, 2024, Loken documented and participated in The Calling, an inaugural Hoodoo Homecoming organized by the Twin Hoodoo Muthas Saint Xolani and Jeida K. Storey. Black Power, resistance, and liberation were summoned and realized by the 26 Black people dressed in white who gathered at the Eno River in Durham, North Carolina to be in community, commune with their ancestors, and practice traditional Afrikan and Black geographically-American spirituality.
In the words of Saint Xolani themself, "Hoodoo is a Black folk spiritual-medicinal tradition formed from the wisdom retained from the Atlantic slave trade and cultivated by Black-Americans and Afro-Diasporic peoples. It centers a Black person's humanity and wholeness. It reinforces their identity through the support of God, the ancestors, the land, and community."
There was laughter and tears, there was celebration, the ancestors were honored and time was escaped.
Loken received the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library 2024 Collections Award for this body of work, allowing the university to add a collection of prints from this series to their archive.
All works shown are available for purchase
The Calling: Hoodoo's Communion with the Ancestors Photo Series
