New NFT drop re.release
Future Lore of Blackness is part of re.flect, a program series that spotlights one of the gallery's artists each month. .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.
Future Lore of Blackness: Nyame Brown
presented by re.riddle at 1632 Market Street, San Francisco
Opening Reception: Friday, September 3 @4-7pm
September 1 - 30, 2021
Hours: Wednesdays - Sundays, 11am-6pm
re.riddle presents, Future Lore of Blackness, a solo exhibition of new work in Hayes Valley, San Francisco that will run from September 1-30, 2021. 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.
Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism
Oakland Museum of California
August 7, 2021 - February 27, 2022
My large-scale blackboard painting What’s Your Black? will will be featured in Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism at the Oakland Museum of California, opening August 7, 2021 and on view through February 27, 2022. My blackboard paintings are envisioned as a tool to combat racial oppression, using a cultural production of the Black community to offer a space to create a new Black mythology. The exhibition celebrates Black imagination and includes the work of some of the central figures of this cultural phenomena. Looking at the past, present, and future reimagined through a Black cultural lens, the work included expresses a just future where Black people and Black ideas thrive. Afrofuturism—fantasy and science fiction that envisions the African Diaspora and Black culture as central in a technically advanced and culturally rich civilization—is a strategy for Black community building. Tickets available here.
The Forge: Gloria Davis Fashion Collaboration
In this immersive textile and painting installation collaboration with fashion designer—and my mother—Gloria Davis, we use architecture, objects, and clothing to conjure the narratives of my painting The Forge: a multi-layered self-portrait examining hip hop bravado and identity.
Reflecting the narrative quality of the characters’ clothes and the architecture by which they are surrounded, we consider the Urban Architecture vernacular as it relates to otherness, and the capacity for a newly-imagined Vernacular Architecture to affirm identity by constructing new physical spaces for our bodies to inhabit. The unbound possibilities for Diasporic speculative world building will be actualized with a live performance of models moving through a space, wearing replicas of the costumes in the painting, loosely playing out its narratives through poses, dance, and props.
The collaboration began following a stay with my mother while she recovered from a medical procedure. Familial-intergenerational artist dialogue between Black creatives has been a through-line in my, and many other Black artists’ lives. Noting other African American artists whose parent is also an artist or creative (Betty Saare, Kara Walker, and Hank Willis Thomas), this relationship is important, unique, and nourishing to both parent and child—providing friction and a wellspring from which to draw.
Afrofuture Tech
A brief look into my studio practice and how I world-build. In it, I demonstrate my drawing a speculative Afrofuturist object from the future: the Afro-pick. Replacing the function of the object from working with kinky hair, I exalt it as an African sculptural object that when paired with technology, acts as a catalyst for consciousness. Deep gratitude to Mylo Video Productions for capturing this moment.
July 2021
Afro Future 4-Dimensional Storytelling
My work, New Black Myths, reaches for the great, poetic, fantastic, eccentric, textural, and epic. Like the classics Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno, New Black Myths is received in verse. It brings together my practice as a visual artist with my passion for lyric, from the historic to contemporary hip hop. Classic literature and hip hop recite in verse using pentameter and create grand narratives where kitsch and the epic coexist in one line.
The project combines large-format scroll drawing with two powerful Black diaspora aesthetics, “call and response” and Improvisation. I invite rap artists to directly engage my large-format scroll drawings, paintings, and installation as they would another emcee in a rap battle, with a live audience present and participating. This oral and visual happening creates a unique space for the two worlds of music and visual art to experience an epic Afrofuturist tale like no other, one that is an avante garde, visual hip hop approach to storytelling and myth-making. I have been fortunate to collaborate with MC Mylo, whose rhymes are fluid, smart, textural, relevant, and thought-provoking. Our cross-pollinating work has been an incubator that facilitates improvisation and idea exchange. Ultimately, the project will take multiple formats, from the 2-D, to freestyle rap, and limited-edition accordion book with a QR code of the audio performance of the emcee to be read along with the book. It will culminate with two performances showcasing the project to an audience at the Vinyl Factory in Los Angeles.
N Square + BSAM
I recently participated with other creatives of color in Strategic Foresight Broadcasting sessions with N Square and BSAM. We’ve been world-building with specific prompts from the newly-developed Afro-Rithms game.
Selected as the 2020 - 2021 Tosa Studio Award Recipient
Sponsored by Victoria Belco and William Goodman, the Tosa Studio Award recognizes one San Francisco Bay Area artist annually, providing a financial stipend and a private studio at 1240 Minnesota Street in the Minnesota Street Project studio building for the award period, with access to the Minnesota Street Project facilities and participation in the creative community.
Journal of Future Studies, “When is Wakanda: A Multimedia Exhibition and Exploration of Afrofuturism and Dark Speculative Futurity,” by Abril Chimal
Dr. Lonny Brooks introduces the concept of Afrofuturetypes, a basis for critiquing images of the future circulating as science fiction capital in popular culture by “hacking” and reimagining them with alternative agents, particularly with Black and other oppressed groups in mind. Black spirituals, rap, and Black musical performances have envisioned the past, present, and future to transform usually ghettoized dystopic spaces into domains of survival, redemption, and openings for imagined futures. Afrofuturetypes guide us in signaling and emphasizing Black futures in process and on the horizon as near to long-term futures. This exhibition welcomes us to see, hear, and feel Afrofuturism and Wakandan imaginings in their digital splendor with contributions by Afrofuturist artists, musicians, and creators of digital exhibits of video, visual compositions, podcasts, creative games, and other mixed media.
May 2021
Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD): In the Artist’s Studio with Curator Elena Gross
Elena Gross, MoAD’s Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs and I sit down to talk about world-building, the Black imagination, and the role that the fantasy and science fiction of Afrofuturism has as a strategy for Black community building by envisioning the African Diaspora and Black culture as central in a technically-advanced and culturally rich civilization.
October 2020
Conversations on Culture #20: Justice at Marin MoCA
Artists Wesaam Al-Badry, Dewey Crumpler, Erica Deeman, Rodney Ewing, Mildred Howard, Lava Thomas, Lewis Watts, and I talk with the curator of Justice, Karen Jenkins-Johnson, and our perspectives on the concept of justice.
November 2020
okayafrica., “Here's What to Expect at This Year's PRIZM Art Fair In Miami,” by Damolo Durosomo
Damolo Durosomo writes about PRIZM Art Fair’s seventh edition which highlights artists from Africa and the Diaspora during Miami Art Week/Art Basel Miami Beach. The exhibit Love in the Time of Hysteria—curated by William Cordova, Ryan Dennis, Naiomy Guerrero, Oshun Layne as well as PRIZM Art Fair's founder and director Mikhaile Solomon—included pieces from 42 international artists, hailing from over 13 different countries, including Barbados, Bahamas, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, Morocco, Nigeria, Egypt, Norway, South Africa, Ghana and the United States.
December 2019
Afro-Rithms from the Future
I’ve been offering my lens as a creative consultant for Afrofuturist game designers Ahmed Best, Lonny J. Avi Brooks, and Eli Kosminsky, in developing speculative Afrofuturist objects for a live drawing demonstration based on participants are developing there speculative worlds of the future.
May 2019
Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) Artist Talk: Classroom In Nevérÿon with Writer Michael Warr
I discuss my paintings and drawings featured in Classroom In Nevérÿon with writer Michael Warr as opportunities to explore the concept of Diaspora as trans-Atlantic, psychic, and imagined spaces. My blackboard paintings—a cultural production of the black community—are a tool to combat racial oppression by providing space to create a new Black mythology.
January 2019
Hyperallergic “Conjuring an Afrofuturist Classroom with Paint and Chalk,” by Benjamin Jones
I had a stimulating conversation with Hyperallergic’s Benjamin Jones on the hypothetical classroom, the production of spacetime, shades of Blackness, and the presence of God in my work—in conjunction with my solo exhibition Classroom In Nevérÿon at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD).
December 2016