Meet Hykeem Gaddis.
Ask Hykeem what he paints & the answer is short: whatever he’s feeling. Ask him to say more & you’d better get a table & a good meal.
He’s a self-taught artist from Las Vegas who was making things before he had a word for it. Stop-motion films shot on instant cameras. Stories written in class. Percussion. Dancing, which he still does without apology. Lego & K’Nex buildouts, & model planes & cars he took apart as often as he put them together, because he had to know how they worked.
That curiosity never left. It shows up in large, bright, layered paintings, in ceramics, furniture & menswear he designs, & in the way he reads a room.
Two successful solo exhibitions so far, the second drawing 250+ people. The most common question afterward is some version of “when’s the next one?” Stay tuned.
The paintings are bold, big, bright, & built in layers of texture, color, & shape. The one people remember is King’s Dead (2025): a tyrant’s head floating amongst the clouds, a village that has finally had enough, & the general celebration of the resistance at its center. People who side with the village stand taller. People who would have sided with the throne go quiet.
Hykeem is not only a political painter, & he’d rather you didn’t file him there. Or in any box, for that matter. Some days it’s history & how little has changed. Some days it’s a cactus outside his window, or the clouds on his daily walk, or a Black family he sees & the idea of a world where that family, all families, can thrive. Some days it’s a sketch on a bench in a park of trees, or furniture for a room that only exists in his head.
Lately he’s obsessed with doors. How a building welcomes you, the metalwork & the hardware, how a door contrasts with the wall around it & whether it has a past, like an old bank or a hotel that’s gone. He wants to know why some spaces tell you where to go next without a word.
Design is the thread through all of it. One of his favorite books is Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, & he reads the world the same way: studying objects, working out the function & the why, admiring the color, the materials, & how every piece fits like a puzzle. The engineering of how something works. The flow of how it’s used.
That eye has a résumé, too. Hykeem’s background is in healthcare operations, where he has shaped the flow of medical clinics, workspaces & businesses. He brings an eye for efficiency, business sense & process, with a creative instinct for style.
He holds clothing to the same standard. Tux, tee & jeans, date night: he wears all of it, & designs selfishly, starting with what he’d want on his own body. The right pockets, the right cut, something that lasts. What bothers him about most brands is that there’s no story behind the clothes.
The studio is in his home for now & while chaotic, it works. Soft, bright light. Plastic sheeting on the walls. Sketches everywhere. A tray of markers, spray-paint caps, rulers & odd-shaped things. Funk, jazz, hip hop, R&B, rock: whatever’s playing finds its way into the layers. He’s quiet & that’s easy to misread. Put him across from a good meal & the stories & the laughs don’t stop.
Las Vegas is home. He’s active in the Nevada arts community & he wants to be part of all of it through its growth: the galleries already established here, the ones on the way like the Las Vegas Museum of Art, rising in Symphony Park. The city is still deciding what its contribution to the art world looks like. Hykeem has lots of ideas & a very large blank canvas for this.
