These days, the conceptual artist Awol Erizku always starts his studio visits with a DJ set. Recently, in his downtown Los Angeles workspace, he stopped showing me the beginning stages of his abstract nail art paintings — featured in I Was Going To Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me, a solo exhibition that debuted in early December during Art Basel Miami — and strolled over to his mixers. He intercut, what the musician and occasional art critic Greg Tate termed, “trap-beat rap” with drops from his friends: “You ain’t from the block. What the fuck you know about cuuulture?” enthused Uzi, his sometimes Bronx-bred studio hand, sounding like a characteristic Cardi B Instragram PSA.

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In an emerging career once preoccupied primarily with photography, Erizku has since repositioned his focus to blending art with music. “Mixing is like art to me,” he said, standing before printed images he shot in 2013 of nude Ethiopian sex workers cast to look like black Venuses. “The sound has to follow the concept behind the work on display. There has to be a direct relationship between the sound and the visual.”

The 28-year-old artist was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and raised in the Andrew Jackson Houses in the South Bronx, but his influences were clear from an early age. In art school at Cooper Union and later at Yale School of Art, where he received his MFA in photography, Erizku was heavily impacted by rappers like Nas and Rakim, as well as the artists David Hammons and Marcel DuChamp. Trying to distill notions of black beauty and “update” key canonical and contemporary works in Western art, Erizku’s first set of photography replaced renaissance figures with fresh-faced black subjects (imagine Kehinde Wiley with a camera). In one such photograph, he repurposes Leonardo Da Vinci’s 15th Century portrait, Lady with an Ermine, as a twentysomething B-girl with faint highlights. The expressionless figure’s pink, blue, and white striped French manicure rests gently on the back of a baby pitbull she cradles in her arms. It is one portrait in a world of imagery that seeks, according to the artist, to “bring my generation into the conversation surrounding ideals of beauty.”