Nyame Oulynji Brown is an Afrofuturist installation artist working in the media of painting, drawing, cut paper, blackboards, augmented reality, gaming, and fashion. His work addresses the Black imagination as a space for new ways to perceive the Diaspora as trans-Atlantic, psychic, and imagined—not just through unity and similarity, but by looking at the dynamics of difference.
Building narratives like scaffolding around art historical references, hip hop, and personal history, he draws on these precedents as a fluid source of reference rather than a fixed and linear projection. Reimagining contemporary notions of Blackness in visual culture, he challenges traditional representation and subverts it for a richer surreal language found in folklore and African American hyperbole. His depictions provide different ways to access African American culture through an approach that seeks social transformation and community revolution. Brown pursues his complex themes through serial bodies of work, sourcing from a rich legacy of cultural practices and symbols, in which allegories and events interact with visions of future potentiality to make paintings of contemporary Black mythologies. Brown’s Afrosurreal discourses use cultural practices and symbols from the Diaspora to build worlds of contemporary Black mythologies.
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.
Brown considers pedagogy a part of his studio practice, often pursuing varied community engagements in combination with his own work. While Artist in Residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, he experimented with cut paper and painting installation in his series New Black Myths and engaged local youth in creating Afrofuturist symbols as part of a shared work for public exhibition. He has served as visiting faculty and lecturer at colleges including the Chicago Art Institute, St. Mary’s College, and the University of Notre Dame, while also working in varied community settings and after school programs.