Akea Brionne, All AMerican Boys, 2020

Akea Brionne Brown (b. 1996, New Orleans, LA) is a photographer, writer, curator, and researcher working in Baltimore, MD. Brionne received her BFA in 2018 from the Maryland Institute College of Art for Photography and Humanities. In 2018, she was announced the Documentarian of Color by Duke University, and her series “Black Picket Fences” was acquired by their permanent collection. In the following year, she was named the 2019 Janet & Walter Sondheim Winner. She has also received the Visual Task Force Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. Her work is also featured in the Smithsonian’s Ralph Rinzler Collection and Archives. In 2019, Brionne also co-founded Shades Collective, a Baltimore-based collective that is dedicated to giving BIPOC space in personal and professional pursuits in the arts and humanities.

In All American Boys, from the “A Brown Millennial” series, Brionne drapes herself in overwhelming images of bare-chested white cowboys and red trucks. Brionne submits a revisionist history, re-adding black bodies into American history, and more specifically the myth of the American cowboy and the American Frontier. She exposes a history of racism, nationalism, and nostalgia within the remembered histories of a legendary American Empire in the West. By placing her body within this pattern of the all-American cowboy Brionne forces the viewer to question the traditional narratives of Western expansion, and the bodies of Natives and other people of color that were suppressed by this movement West.

Stamp Gallery, 2021