T Z U  P O R É    A R T 

statement

As a Detroit-based interdisciplinary artist and curator, my work is a living exploration of urban ecology, ancestral memory, and cultural design. Born and raised in Detroit, I create from a place of rootedness—my practice shaped by the city’s layered histories, its raw material realities, and the resilient spirit that raised me. My work braids fine art, symbolic rituals of personal grooming, and biophilic urban agriculture into a living language of devotion. These disciplines are not separate lanes but interconnected systems of care, ritual, and transformation that inform both my artistic and curatorial lens.

My visual art spans painting, sculpture, and immersive installation, each grounded in a tactile relationship with the natural world. I work with soil, fiber, wood, metal, and found materials not as metaphors but as collaborators—materials that carry memory, weather, and time. In my paintings, I use professional artist paints and museum‑archival, industry‑standard materials to ensure longevity, stability, and fidelity of color. These works often emerge from processes that mirror ecological cycles: layering, erosion, sediment, growth. Surfaces behave like landscapes; gestures echo the rhythms of tending, pruning, and cultivating. This rootedness in the raw world is not aesthetic posturing—it is the foundation of my discipline and the source of my curatorial authenticity.

As a curator, I move with the same integrity that guides my studio practice. My curatorial eye is shaped by lived experience, by years of working with my hands, by the rituals of grooming and growing, and by a deep respect for the communities and ecosystems that inform my work. I curate from the inside out—from process, from material truth, from the embodied knowledge of someone who has spent decades studying how people shape environments and how environments shape people. This is what allows me to recognize authenticity in others’ work: I know what it looks like, feels like, and requires.

This ethos is embodied in the Second Annual activation of Hair Is The Garden We Wear™—now presented as a full art exhibition at EMB Contemporary in recognition of Black History Month and the Lunar Calendar New Year. This year’s exhibition brings together a powerhouse lineup of artists whose practices span emerging to blue‑chip: Yvette Rock, Geoffrey “Geo” Edwards, Nia Crutcher, Lisa Anderson, Henton Stinson, and myself. Their works range from early career explorations to recent pieces created as far away as New York, where Detroit native Nia Crutcher is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting at Pratt Institute. Curating this constellation of artists is an extension of my own practice—an act of cultural stewardship, ecological thinking, and devotion to the living archive of Black and Brown creativity.

My project Hair Is The Garden We Wear™ reframes grooming as a sacred act of cultivation. Each cut is a design of intention, a tactile meditation on identity, and a celebration of Black and Brown aesthetics. This philosophy extends into my agricultural work, where I treat soil and scalp as parallel sites of healing, growth, and resistance. These practices inform my paintings and sculptures, which carry the same devotion to ritual, lineage, and ecological intelligence.

Through this integrated approach, I challenge conventional notions of art, labor, and legacy. My work is not confined to galleries—it lives in gardens, barbershops, and community spaces. It is worn, grown, tended, and felt. As both artist and curator, I build environments that honor the beauty of self-determined culture and the power of material truth.

Ultimately, my practice is a devotion—an offering to the city that shaped me, a testament to the natural and ancestral worlds that sustain me, and a blueprint for living artfully, intentionally, and in rhythm with land, lineage, and community.

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bio

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Tzu Poré is a published, award‑winning interdisciplinary artist, curator, designer barber, and urban cultivator from Detroit, Michigan. A devoted Taurus with an old‑school spirit and a modern edge, Poré has shaped a life where creative practice and lived experience are inseparable. His work moves fluidly across fine art, symbolic rituals of personal grooming, and biophilic urban agriculture—disciplines he approaches as interconnected systems of care, design, and cultural memory.

Poré’s foundation in visual communication was shaped through extensive study at the College for Creative Studies, where he developed a sharp understanding of materiality, form, and cultural design. His influences span Black Afro‑Caribbean Americana, ancestral technologies, and the socio‑ecological histories of Detroit. Across mediums, he works with intention and precision, using professional artist paints and museum‑archival materials to ensure the longevity and integrity of his fine art.

His early years in the U.S. Army as an aviation mechanic instilled a tactile intelligence with tools, structure, and process—skills that now inform the architectural depth of his paintings and sculptural works. After returning home, Poré expanded his practice through barbering in Detroit and Los Angeles, exploring hair as both medium and metaphor. This inquiry evolved into Hair Is The Garden We Wear™, a philosophy and creative framework that treats grooming as sacred design and the body as a living archive.

Today, Hair Is The Garden We Wear™ extends into curatorial practice. Its Second Annual exhibition at EMB Contemporary—presented in honor of Black History Month and the Lunar Calendar New Year—features a powerhouse lineup of artists including Yvette Rock, Geoffrey “Geo” Edwards, Nia Crutcher, Lisa Anderson, Henton Stinson, and Poré. The exhibition spans generations, geographies, and artistic lineages, reflecting Poré’s curatorial commitment to authenticity, material truth, and the cultural ecosystems that shape Black and Brown creativity.

As founder and lead curator of EMB Contemporary on Detroit’s east side, Poré cultivates a space dedicated to creative autonomy, cultural stewardship, and community‑rooted innovation. His agricultural practice, guided by biophilic principles, treats land as legacy and cultivation as resistance—an ethos that echoes throughout his visual and curatorial work.

Poré’s life and art are deeply intertwined. His work lives in gardens, barbershops, studios, and community spaces. It is grown, worn, tended, and felt. Through this integrated practice, he continues to shape new possibilities for beauty, labor, and legacy in Detroit and beyond.

clubs​

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SCARAB CLUB

DETROIT FINE ARTS BREAKFAST CLUB

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DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ART

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MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART DETROIT

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DETROIT ARTIST MARKET

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