Thelonious Stokes is an academically trained oil painter, filmmaker, performance artist and designer based in Florence, Italy. He’s the first African American to graduate from the prestigious Florence Academy of Art and founder of The Black Academy of Art in Italy. Shaped by his Baptist culture and upbringing around jazz music on the Southside of Chicago, Stokes gravitated towards art at an early age as a means to express himself. Stokes’s work interrogates Western art history and Judeo-Christian themes – challenging and recontextualizing the canon to include themes and depictions of Black figuration that have been historically omitted. In this creative and illuminating conversation we discuss his upbringing, training, practice, being collected by Madonna, Jean-Michel Basquiat, his friendship with Chance the Rapper & Vic Mensa, adventures in Africa and much, much more!