"All American Boys"
Description
Akea Brionne (b.1996 New Orleans, LA) is a photographer, writer, curator, and researcher working in Baltimore, MD. Akea 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. Her series Black Picket Fences was acquired by their permanent collection. In 2019 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. Also in 2019, Akea 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.
The CAPP Committee has chosen to purchase the work All American Boys from the A Brown Millennial Series. The series was exhibited in her first solo show in 2020 and features four photographic portraits saturated with colorful backgrounds and the aesthetics of Americana. Akea creates a 3-dimensionality in the work by positioning herself in front of a flat patterned background. The same fabric then wraps around her body to create a silhouette that initially blends into the picture plane before jumping out from the monotony of the patterned background. In the particular piece "All American Boys" Akea drapes herself in overwhelming images of bare chested white cowboys and red trucks.
Akea submits a revisionist history, re-adding black bodies into American history, and more specifically the myth of the American cowboy. 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 Akea 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.
In her own words, Akea describes her practice as “nestled somewhere in between photography and critical theory.” She intertwines the personal and political, wrapping her contemporary body into history and culture to unpack the reality of privilege and force the viewer to ask difficult questions.
The CAPP Committee has chosen to purchase the work All American Boys from the A Brown Millennial Series. The series was exhibited in her first solo show in 2020 and features four photographic portraits saturated with colorful backgrounds and the aesthetics of Americana. Akea creates a 3-dimensionality in the work by positioning herself in front of a flat patterned background. The same fabric then wraps around her body to create a silhouette that initially blends into the picture plane before jumping out from the monotony of the patterned background. In the particular piece "All American Boys" Akea drapes herself in overwhelming images of bare chested white cowboys and red trucks.
Akea submits a revisionist history, re-adding black bodies into American history, and more specifically the myth of the American cowboy. 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 Akea 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.
In her own words, Akea describes her practice as “nestled somewhere in between photography and critical theory.” She intertwines the personal and political, wrapping her contemporary body into history and culture to unpack the reality of privilege and force the viewer to ask difficult questions.
Creator
Akea Brionne
Date
2020
Files
Collection
Citation
Akea Brionne , “"All American Boys",” Contemporary Art Purchasing Program - Stamp Gallery, accessed May 16, 2024, https://contemporaryartumd.artinterp.org/omeka/items/show/132.