THE MISSION OF DOPE

Depicting Our Peoples Excellence is a collectible art brand, whose effort is dedicated to documenting and making more widely available through produced collectibles the wealth of Black Icons found throughout this country’s long history. These collectible art figurines are created with all the skill, authenticity, and love they deserve. Through collectible art, DOPE aims to plant a flag to show where collectibles should be moving toward in the future.

Depicting Our Peoples Excellence (aka. DOPE) is excited to introduce to you a single Black artist, a self-taught sculptor and painter, who is on a fantastical and driven mission to contribute. Through the documentation of Black history past and present; he works hard to uplift, inspire, and empower.  Acori Honzo, an artist since childhood, started his artistic career in collectibles a decade ago.  Confronted with the opportunity to purchase only a single Black figure at retail, and even fewer Black mentors in the world of collectible figures, he picked up clay and taught  himself how to fill in that gap in the creative world.  His private obsession to create for himself has transitioned from recognition by private collectors, to that celebration and manning of a gallery space in Philadelphia, to now the launching, creatively leading, and co-owning of a collectible brand with other similarly focused Black creatives.  

Larry Robertson, Saddler Ward, and LaWanda Shepherd are embarking on this endeavor along with Acori Honzo as co-owners of DOPE.  They are people who share a common goal and purpose to depict Historical and Cultural Black Icons for a demographic that has been neglected and overlooked in the collectible art space for far too long.