J. Johari Palacio is a visual artist whose paintings, drawings, and assemblages move like records — layered, looped, ruptured. His work constructs a counter-mythology rooted in Afrofuturism, built from the rhythms and frequencies of Black sound. Sun Ra and John Akomfrah operate here less as references than as instructions for how images can be built.

The visual language of the work comes from somewhere specific: the South Los Angeles street art scene Palacio came up in from the late 1980s into the early 1990s, and a parallel practice as a selector. The meanstreak line — a tool from tagging — recurs across his work as both gesture and signature, a frequency made visible. Surfaces are built the way a record is built — through accumulation, through return, through the cut.

Recent projects include Cathedral (2023), which anchors his current body of work, and Unlocking Frequency, a 2025 solo exhibition of large-scale scrolls presented by Janice Bond / Art Is Bond in collaboration with Studio Eight08 and Emergent & Co. in Houston. His work has been covered by Glasstire and the Houston Chronicle, and presented at the University of Chicago's Arts + Public Life, the Logan Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.