SEATTLE ART MUSEUM HONORS BRENNA YOUNGBLOOD WITH THE 2015 GWENDOLYN KNIGHT | JACOB LAWRENCE PRIZE
Buffalo Burger, 2012.
Youngblood will receive a $10,000 award, along with a solo exhibition at SAM
(Updated Nov 12, 2015)
SEATTLE, WA – Seattle Art Museum (SAM) announces the selection of Brenna Youngblood as the winner of the 2015 Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize. Youngblood will be honored with a $10,000 award to further her artistic practice. Her work will also be featured in a solo exhibition in SAM’s Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Gallery in 2015.
3 dollar bill (dirty Money), 2013.
Brenna Youngblood explores the iconography of public and private suburban experience, issues of identity, ethics, and representation, and the politics of abstraction using photo-based collage, painting, assemblage, and sculpture.
“Created through a handmade process of addition, subtraction, layering and peeling, Brenna Youngblood’s art is subtle yet effective as she communicates personal experiences through common objects. The result is remarkable,” says Kimerly Rorschach, SAM’s Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director and CEO. “Her artistic and cultural practice truly honors the legacy of the Lawrences.”
Installation view, 2014.
Trained as a photographer, Youngblood’s early work—layered photomontages drawn from her everyday life—incorporated images of her family and friends, storefronts, police cars, and snapshots of domestic objects, such as bare light bulbs, cheap wood veneer, TVs, and aging upholstery.
Now, 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.
Modern Welfare, 2012.
A recent Art in America review of Youngblood’s exhibition ACTIVISION (2013) at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles describes, “the viewing experience—with its many dimensions and possible interpretations—was far from a simple encounter with utilitarian objects. She reeled the viewer out of complacency and into active vision.”
In a conversation with Franklin Sirmans, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and department head of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Youngblood explains her organic and intuitive approach to art, “Imperfection is especially important to me in creating an abstract foundation that makes the eye travel. I’m not trying to render with paint, but with photography imagery layered over washy, painted backgrounds.”
The benevolent and the malevolent, 2014.
Youngblood’s first book and monograph, Brenna Youngblood: The Mathematics of Individual Achievement, published in 2013 by MISPRINT Press, traces the artist’s investigations with photography, collage, painting, and sculpture. Inspired by one of Youngblood’s schoolbooks, the monograph is organized as a series of lessons that provide critical context for Youngblood’s expansive work.
Youngblood’s solo show at SAM will be curated by Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chairman of Education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and SAM’s former Deputy Director for Education and Public Programs/ Adjunct Curator in Modern and Contemporary Art.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
The Hammer Project, 2006.
Brenna Youngblood was born in Riverside, California and lives in Los Angeles. Youngblood received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University, Long Beach in 2002 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006. Honor Fraser Gallery has presented two exhibitions featuring Youngblood’s work to date: The Mathematics of Individual Achievement (2011) and Activision (2013). One-person exhibitions of her work include Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, Wignall Museum, Rancho Cucamonga, CA (2007); and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2006). Her work has been included in thematic exhibitions such as Rites of Spring, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2014); Murmurs: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2013); Fore, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2012); Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Unfinished Paintings, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA (2011); With You I Want to Live, Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL (2009); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2008); and Blacks In and Out of the Box, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2007). She is represented by Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles.