Moody Mondays beg for a beautifully moody piece. Brenna Youngblood’s work combines expressionist and textural techniques with her formal background in photography. She takes found pieces of everyday objects like discarded paper bags, tree shaped car fresheners and photographs and applies them to canvas. Her paintings embody that point of collision between color field painting and abstraction. Youngblood’s 2015 Project 50 Series explored issues of memory, identity and class, while some of her most recent work currently shown at Honor Fraser Gallery raises more existential questions surrounding mortality and the body.
A consistent technical theme in Youngblood’s body of work centers on this interplay between abstraction and figuration. In March her work will be featured in a spring exhibition by the Hammer called “A Shape That Stands Up”. The group show, curated by Jamillah James, will explore the “gray space between abstraction and figuration in recent painting and sculpture.” The exhibition opens on March 19th and will be hosted by Art + Practice in Leimert Park.
The “Artist a Day Challenge” celebrates Black History Month by highlighting Black artists and diverse forms of cultural expression across the African diaspora.
Culture Shock Art 