Brenna Youngblood

In photo-based collage, painting, assemblage, and sculpture, Brenna Youngblood explores the iconography of urban African American experience, issues of identity, ethics, and representation, and the politics of abstraction. Youngblood’s early work—layered photomontages drawn from her everyday life—incorporated images of her family and friends, storefronts, and police cars, and snapshots of domestic objects, such as bare light bulbs, cheap wood veneer, TVs, and aging upholstery. Concerned with the formal qualities of imagery and objects, she integrates found objects and materials into her painterly compositions, and has sometimes examined more political subject matter, such as in www.Alphabetboys.com (2012), a grid of institutional acronyms, from IRS to FEMA. Her work is often considered in the context of West Coast assemblage artists such as Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, and Betye Saar.