[Iona] Rozeal [Brown]

Photograph courtesy of Chester Higgins, Jr. / The New York Times / Redux

Portfolio of Artwork 899-903

Over the last decade the painter Iona Rozeal Brown has created a fantastical body of work that unites so many seemingly irreconcilable realities—Japanese ukiyo-e prints and hip-hop; voguing and Noh and Kabuki theater; West African adinkra symbols and graffiti; Byzantine religious painting and comic-book motifs—that it gives new meaning to the idealized space of the canvas.

from Randy Kennedy, “Single Works with Myriad Influences,” New York Times, February 22, 2013

[Iona] Rozeal [Brown] (b. 1966), a native of Washington, DC, is a mixed media artist who graduated from the University of Maryland in 1991 with a BS in kinesiological sciences, and received the BFA at San Francisco School of Art (1999) and the MFA from Yale University (2002). She also studied at Pratt Institute and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. In solo and group shows, she has exhibited her artworks in museums, galleries, and other art venues in Milan (Italy), Montreal (Canada), Stockholm (Sweden), Dehli (India), Basel (Switzerland), and Wellington (New Zealand), as well as in such United States cities as Los Angeles, Washington, DC, New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Sacramento, and Hollywood. The Joyce Foundation Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and the US Japan Creative Artists Fellowship are but some of the honors she has received for her achievements as a visual artist. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

“I paint what I want to see,” Rozeal proclaimed to LeRonn P. Brooks, as he began recording with her a recent interview (July 3, 2015), “and they [my paintings] usually stem from questions about how I personally feel and about an outward thing or a question that is being presented about the world at large and my feelings about it. Ultimately, it is about something that I want to see.”

BROOKS:

You were talking about the “inner” discourse, in terms of what you feel inside and in the world. Do you feel you reveal yourself through your work?

ROZEAL:

Man, I try not to. I try to keep myself out of it. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but I don’t think I am very good at it. I think they’re so me. There is so much of me in them. It’s interesting hearing you talk about all these different time periods coexisting on the surfaces [of my paintings] and I think that is kind of how I am. I believe that’s how I grew up. My mom would be listening to gospel, my dad would be listening to jazz, and I would be listening to rap, R&B, and slow jams. It’s all existing at the same time, under the same roof. I think we’re all like that. I think if we grew up with elders that’s just inherently who people are. There’s always that. There’s what you have that’s you, who you’re discovering as you are a child, and you have whatever you are opting to take from your parents—your parents hoping it’s everything.

BROOKS:

If you are exposed to it, it’s there.

ROZEAL:

And you know it comes through food. It comes through music. It comes through clothes. It comes through our hairstyles. For me it comes through smell, [the senses] and, you know, the way that my body moves through the space. I have so much of both my parents in me and in my facial expressions that that’s just who we are as people. I think it’s a very involuntary thing. It just happens. It’s like breathing. We just are who we are. We are either who we are or we are pretending to be something else, but if we are pretending to be something else that’s still who we are too. I think that sometimes the paintings are . . . well, in the legerity that I hold the paintings to there may be some specific lyric or there...