Shifting Roots: Hair is the Garden We Wear

Detroit barber and artist Tzu Poré talks with writer Kahn Santori Davison about Poré's project Shifting Roots. The project fuses symbolic hair design, ritual healing, and fine art into one unified ecosystem of transformation. Through intentional grooming, visual storytelling, and community activation, this initiative presents identity as terrain—where hair becomes soil, and fine art becomes the bloom. Poré will share how his cultural roots shape his work in the garden, on canvas, and as a trained barber/cultural griot.

About Tzu Poré:
Educated in the early '90s at College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, Tzu Poré is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the themes of Black Afro-Caribbean Americana humanity, historical socio-economic position, and ancient tradition in the modern world, richly informed by strong community-family bonds.

With West Indian origins and a Pan-African world view, Poré, in 1997, enlisted in the US Army. While serving as an aviation mechanic, Poré honed a deeper understanding of methods and processes of fusing materials such as minerals and solids that he has since used to increase the physical texture and visual depth in his paintings.

Shortly after being discharged in 2001, he embarked on an exploration of hair as an artistic medium of texture and sculpture, both on and off the canvas, while moonlighting as a barber in three major African-American markets—Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.

With nearly three decades of travel and experience, Poré reemerges with new work that culminates in the perfect union of interdisciplinary artistry and a vividly dynamic multinational skillset. Poré's continued evolution as an artist allows him to boldly express with the unconventional creative range of mediums and processes that he uses to confront the challenge of affecting depth within two-dimensional art.

About Kahn Santori Davison
Kahn Santori Davison, based in Detroit, is a music writer for The Metro Times. He was formerly an art columnist for The Gazette News and an Arts and Entertainment writer for The Michigan Citizen. He has served as a creative writing instructor at Detroit Impact Community Center and InsideOut Literary Arts Project. He was one half of the poetry group Khaos and co-star in the award-winning play Mahogany Dreams. He’s a Cave Canem fellow whose work has been featured in The Alabama Poetry Society, The Entoitist, The Baltimore Review, London’s X-Bout, Barbaric Yap, Callaloo, Black Reniaissance Noire, and The Litchfield Review. He has read and lectured widely in Europe and the United States.

Davison served as a 2023 Kresge Eminent Artist panelist, and a 2017 Kresge Artist Fellowship panelist in Literary Arts.