Future Lore of Blackness: Nyame Brown

[Originally posted on ReRiddle.com]

September 1 – 30, 2021

Opening Reception: Friday, September 3 from 4-7pm

1632 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
Wednesday – Sunday, 11am-6pm
  

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 whosestories 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.

Nyame Brown – “John Henry Returning From Up Norf Looking Ghetto-Fabulous” – previously sold on BuyBlackArt.com

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.

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