future lore of blackness: nyame brown
September 1-30, 2021
Opening Reception: Friday, September 3rd from 4 - 7pm
1632 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94012
Gallery Hours: Weds-Sun 11am - 6pm
re.riddle is pleased to present Future Lore of Blackness a solo exhibition of new work by Nyame Brown, from September 1-30. This exhibition is the part of re.flect, a program series that spotlights one of the gallery's artists each month. The rotating monthly series offers in-depth access into the respective processes and practices of our global community of artists. In addition, the artists have partnered with re.riddle to release unique works at special prices. These exclusive pieces will only be available during the month of the related exhibition.
Curatorial Statement
Can the imagined alternate-realities of science-fiction make room for a more just present? How might the cultural boundaries of society’s past and present be dilated into new stratospheres? Future Lore of Blackness offers work by Nyame Brown which deploys fantasy and science fiction as a strategy to elevate Black communities. His paintings utilize the formal structure of a traditional art historical narrative with Afrosurreal aesthetics, resulting in contemporary history paintings of the Black future.
The wrinkle-in-time effect of Brown’s paintings is enhanced by their fantastic circumstances: aspirational interstellar superheroes, video game gods/goddesses, and technicolored therianthropes navigating both familiar and unfamiliar architectures. By using Renaissance and Baroque compositional techniques to tell stories of the African diaspora, American folklore, and contemporary hip hop culture, Brown usurps Western patriarchal power structures to introduce new ways of social transformation and paradigms of equity.
Brown’s work moves the realm of Afrofuturism—considered to be the largest interdisciplinary movement since the Harlem Renaissance—even further forward, manifesting the African diaspora and Black culture at the center of a technically-advanced and radically just civilization. Regularly situating his characters at the center of his compositions, and guiding the viewer towards the protagonist(s) through converging, perspective planes, Brown underscores the significance of storytelling and whose stories are told. His narrative-building takes an idiosyncratic turn in modelling physically impossible architectonic surroundings and medium-shifting swaths of sketches to underscore the intentionality of our built environments, breaking the illusion of artifice and curated narratives. Brown recasts archetypal art historical gestures with the swag of urban hip hop culture. For example, the piercing cerulean floor plane edge and extending high-top sneaker heel in Galo Canto, echoes Caravaggio’s iconic illusion-shattering details, like the picture plane puncturing elbow of Saint Nicodemus in his Deposition. Brown’s character’s comportments create their own visual lexicon similar to the classical contrapposto (In the Forge of Crackniculous), seductive Odalisque, and empowered Vitruvian man (Black Humor). His works are richly layered with symbolic infusions of Black street fashion, martial arts, folklore symbolism and garish pop culture.
By creating a mental framework for unexplored potentialities, Brown allows for the expansion and flourishing of Black identities and narratives. His reclamation of art history for the future-present fights for the right to and destiny of speculative fantasy. When canonized, Eurocentric notions of restraint, hierarchy, and racism are eliminated or subverted. In doing so, what loads are lifted? What unforeseeable destinations can be reached? Herman Poole Blount, aka Sun Ra, a central pioneer of Afrofuturism asked it more poignantly: “If you are not a myth, whose reality are you? If you are not a reality whose myth are you?”
Explore Nyame Brown’s self-determined Black alternate realities in Future Lore of Blackness at 1632 Market Street in San Francisco, September 1-30.
Programming and re.release
In partnership with re.riddle, and as part of our re.flect program series, Nyame Brown will create four unique NFT artworks from his Congo Couture series to be offered at special prices only during the month of September.
Please join us each week on Mondays at 12pm via IG Live @re.riddle, where Brown will present his NFT release for the week.
In Conversation: Rhonda Pagnozzi x Binta Ayofemi x Nyame Brown
Saturday, September 18
1pm PST/ 3pm CST/ 4pm EST
Please join us this Saturday for an engaging conversation with artists Nyame Brown, Binta Ayofemi and Rhonda Pagnozzi, Curator of Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California about world building, Black-Sci speculative imagery, and Afrofuturism.
This event is part of re.flect, an exhibition and program series that spotlights one of the gallery's artists each month. The rotating monthly series offers in-depth access into the respective processes and practices of our global community of artists.
If you missed the program and would like to watch the talk, click below:
click on images for more detail
re.release (Ends September 30th)
Artist Bio
Nyame Brown received his BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA from Yale School of Art and Architecture. He has been the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and the Richard Dreihaus Foundation Individual Artist Award, as well as a site-specific public commission for the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, for which he executed a double portrait of Malcolm X and the artist Jack Whitten. His participation in Theaster Gates’ Black Artist Retreat in Chicago was followed by residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts (for work on his project The Mapping of Aaron, A Model for Radical Blackness), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Brown was honored with a solo exhibition at The Museum of the African Diaspora, and has held solo exhibitions across the U.S., notably at the Hearst Museum at St. Mary’s College (John Henry’s Adventures in a Post-Black World) and the West Virginia University Art Museum. He has actively participated in group exhibitions in a variety of spaces in California, Illinois, Michigan and New York, and his work has been curated for inclusion at the Museum of Harlem, NY and the Prizm Art Fair at the Mana Contemporary in Miami. He also took part with Carrie Mae Weems in the symposium The Interrogation of Forms: The Changing Culture in America at The Armory in New York. Brown was selected as the 2020 Tosa Studio Award recipient and was awarded a studio at Minnesota Street Project through 2021. His work will be featured in the group exhibition Mothership: Voyage into Afrofuturism at the Oakland Museum of California, through February 2022, and in a group show at The Hyde Park Art Center in summer 2022.