Pope Gaskine Billy Hoodoo is a contemporary multidisciplinary artist and founder of Ancestors Galleries: The Living Archive LLC, a platform dedicated to positioning art as living, appreciating cultural capital. Working across painting, installation, music, and conceptual design, his practice explores perception, legacy, and the unseen systems that shape reality.

His work has been featured in major cultural spaces including the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, BUTTER Art Fair, Newfields Museum of Art 2024 NBA All-Star Art Show, with large-scale mural installations throughout Indianapolis. His work and name have been referenced in Forbes and The New York Times, reflecting a growing national and institutional footprint.

Rooted in a philosophy of artistic osmosis, Hoodoo’s practice focuses on building ecosystems rather than isolated objects—spaces where art, community, and economic sustainability reinforce one another. Through exhibitions, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and long-term institutional vision, his work functions simultaneously as cultural archive and future asset.

He continues to develop Ancestors Galleries as an art-bank model, treating creative work not only as expression, but as inheritance.

Life & Times of Pope Gaskine Billy Hoodoo

Pope Gaskine Billy Hoodoo (also credited simply as Pope Gaskine) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist, musician, and creative thinker from Indianapolis, Indiana, whose work spans painting, sculpture, digital art, music, jewelry and clothing design. His art is driven by a blend of synesthesia, esthesia, spirituality, and lived experience, and reflects a deep engagement with both personal vision and cultural dialogue. 

Early Life & Creative Beginnings

Gaskine grew up on the East Side of Indianapolis, where his creativity was shaped by a combination of sensory perception and environment. He credits synesthesia—a neurological blending of senses—and esthesia—a heightened sensitivity to emotional and physical experience—as key sources of his artistic inspiration. 

Initially a musician, Gaskine began his creative journey early, studying the trumpet in fourth grade, developing a deep connection to jazz and classical music. This musical foundation would later inform his visual work, helping him explore composition, rhythm, and color in ways few traditional painters do. 

Turning Point: From Passion to Practice

His transition to visual art was organic rather than academic. After receiving an art kit around the birth of his daughter, he quickly moved to canvas work and began producing oil and acrylic paintings prolifically. Within a month of working on stretched canvas he had already completed multiple paintings and sold work in Houston, where he realized he could support himself as a professional artist. 

Gaskine’s practice is self-directed and intuitive: he hasn’t taken formal art classes since elementary school, choosing instead to learn through experience, observation, and daily creation. That openness to ongoing growth gives his work a freshness that he describes as “seeing the world through the eyes of a child.” 

Artistic Style & Themes

Gaskine’s body of work includes expressionistic oil and acrylic paintings, digital compositions, sculptural objects, and hybrid multimedia pieces. He often draws on vibrant color, abstract theology, metaphysical concepts, and lived memory, making work that moves between internal worlds and external realities. 

His multifaceted practice intentionally defies easy categorization. Alongside traditional painting, he explores wearable art, digital artforms, and conceptual design—an approach that places him squarely in the lineage of artists who see the creative act as a total environment rather than a single medium. 

Community Engagement & Collective Work

Gaskine is a member of The Eighteen Art Collective, a group of Indianapolis artists working collaboratively to elevate Black creative voices through public art, community projects, and exhibitions. As part of this collective, he contributed to the Black Lives Matter mural on historic Indiana Avenue, expressing his vision through powerful public work and community engagement. 

Exhibitions, Recognition & Impact

His work has been featured in significant exhibitions, most notably at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields in the We. The Culture: Works by The Eighteen Art Collective exhibition that ran through 2023. 

In addition to gallery and museum exhibitions, his art continues to be shown in studios, community walk-through galleries, and public art spaces throughout Indianapolis and beyond. 

Philosophy & Ongoing Practice

At the core of Gaskine’s work is an insistence on creative freedom, sensory dialogue, and cultural resonance. Whether through a canvas, a mural, a digital design, or a musical composition, he seeks to map the invisible—the emotional, spiritual, and metaphysical realities that often escape conventional representation. 

His ongoing goals include expanding his artistic reach, supporting emerging creatives in his community, and deepening the dialogue between art, lived experience, and collective history through Ancestors Galleries: The Living Archive LLC —the venture he founded to reposition artistic work as both cultural inheritance and economic force.