DESAI | MATTA GALLERY

NYAME BROWN | BAY-SICK BLACK: NEW MYTHOLOGIES FROM BLACK SPECULATIVE WORLD BUILDING

That was the powerful part of African American folklore—that it blended the everyday with the 
fantastical. Then (my) goal was to figure out how to create the stories visually.

Artist and storyteller Nyame Brown makes paintings that reside somewhere between the mythological, fantastical, and futuristic. Remixing experience, folklore, and popular-culture, Brown’s narrative paintings depict new characters and stories to describe and conjure the past, present, and future of African Americans in the Bay Area. 

In one painting, a large man with an elaborate green suit sits atop the Bay Bridge with his head in the clouds and his body turned away from the viewer in contemplation. A hybrid between the artist and folk hero John Henry, the figure relaxes and smokes in his seat on the suspension cable between towers on the bridge. “That fog is surrounding us. But he’s also lost in his thoughts and dreams while taking a moment to relax because the Black body also needs to relax.” As with many of his paintings, the background is porous, showing the gridlines from earlier drawings, exposing the scaffolding of the imagery, while at the same time leaving space for the viewer to fill in the blanks. 

Storytelling runs in Brown’s family: his grandmother and father often told him stories that sidled up comfortably with the fantastical. His works carry on this tradition of storytelling, while taking agency to tell new stories, responding to new needs and contemporary circumstance.

There is a need to see new stories, ones that have an African nucleus, but spinning them away and re-mixing some of the symbols away, almost like the African root
there, but it’s not the first thing, you know? And after you peel the layers back, you then go, “Oh, man, the root is African.”

Throughout the exhibition, we see the artist depicted as a hybrid between himself and the character of John Henry, a folk hero and “steel driving man” whose story of strength and power is told in a song made famous in the 1950s by Harry Belafonte. We also see other traditional characters from African American folklore, like Brother Gator, who Brown depicts as hybrid human and alligator, and Panther 13, who is a new hybrid of a woman and a panther, representing the Women of the Black Panther Party.

“I like to have the ability to present some of these ideas about these new myths, new ways of kind of thinking about how we might look in the future.
What are the stories (where we’re) the center of what’s going on?”