As you read this, Iona Rozeal Brown will have barely begun to settle down 6,000 miles from her home in Maryland. The 38-year-old painter recently took up a fellowship to spend six months in Japan while she contemplates the art she will make next.
There aren't many artists more suited to the trip.
Iona Rozeal Brown, now on a six-month visit to Japan, mixes geisha imagery and hip-hop culture in her paintings.
(Photos Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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There are some obvious reasons for thinking this. Her best-known paintings have taken the geisha imagery of classic Japanese prints and melded it with American hip-hop culture. In the world of Brown's art, blackface geishas smoke huge doobies and cultivate their cornrows. That art is selling unusually well for an artist at the start of her career: She's had sold-out shows in New York and Los Angeles, and Annie Gawlak, Brown's Washington dealer, says that the first batch of "blackface" pictures can't be had at all. Andrea Barnwell, a curator at Spelman College who recently gave Brown her second museum solo, describes her as "one of the nation's most exciting emerging artists."
Brown based her best-selling images on a 1990s fad that saw young Japanese women -- known as ganguro -- darkening their skin and putting on some of the trappings of black rappers. So it makes sense for her to spend some time getting to know the foreign culture that fed her most successful art.
But I think there's more to the trip than that. Brown and the art she makes seem powerfully affected by displacements of all kinds. Sure, Brown's specially interested in Asian art and culture. She says she's always had a thing for the Far East, dating back to trips downtown from her childhood home in Chillum, in Prince George's County just beyond the northeast District line. (With the deaths of her parents, she's recently found herself living there again.) Brown remembers her mother taking her to the Mall to see kabuki theater and bunraku puppets shipped in from Japan, as well as a troupe from China doing wushu martial arts. Looking over Brown's whole career as an art student and then artist, however, you see that she has had an outsider's take on cultures much nearer home than that.
Even her persona seems to involve cultural cleavage. In a soaring loft downtown, she seems at first to fit the standard image of your up-and-coming artist: The ancient living-room furniture that inhabits the studio is half hidden under piles of clippings and photocopies, all grist for Brown's artistic mill. ("One of the beautiful things about having a studio is that you can just wallow in your own squalor," she says.) Various half-finished paintings are pinned to the wall, and her clothes are precisely as paint-splattered as they're supposed to be.
There's even Kaya, the mandatory artist's mutt, sweet but needy and eager to muscle in on Brown's sophisticated artist's talk -- about the vexed issue of allegory; about artistic "process" and the studio as the "lab" where it takes place; about the importance of painting "articulate" pictures; about the "Other" and the "Gaze" and similar high-end ideas, all cited with a touch of modest irony.
Look more closely, however, and there's another take on Brown. All that paint is splattered on a black hoody and Army-surplus khakis, the uniform of African American street culture. A fan of hip-hop for years, she worked in record stores before ever thinking of going to art school. Her first attempts at art involved graffiti script. She's still in bands, hangs out with musicians and DJs and has been known to spin vinyl herself. "I love the idea of being able to manipulate a sound -- of turntablism and scratching. I'm a huge fan of that," she says. Like many black musicians, she talks about how she hates "the whole consumer vibe" of mainstream hip-hop. She says her first reaction as a black woman to the superficiality of Japanese blackface was "naw, dude, that's not cool."
For years, people highly trained in the fine arts have investigated popular culture in their work: They've looked to the exotic world of pop to energize their rarefied high art. But with Brown you get the sense things worked the other way around: She makes sense of the foreignness of high art by marrying it to the pop culture she came to first. It's art that is the exotic "other" she needs to investigate. Like ganguro girls and rap, she makes fine art her own by mixing it with what she knows.
Six years ago, when she was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Brown dealt with high art's foreignness by inserting her African American features and body into great works from the European past. In one picture she took the headless "Winged Victory of Samothrace," one of the high points of classical Greek art, and completed it with her own black face; in another, a slender Renaissance saint bewailing the dead Christ -- a breathtaking masterpiece by the Italian sculptor Niccolo Dell'arca -- becomes the round-bodied Brown, crying out against some modern atrocity.
Brown had a generally cultured upbringing. Her father was an academic adviser at the University of the District of Columbia; her mom taught math in junior high. They were keen on music and the performing arts and encouraged their daughter's interest in calligraphy. But when it came to the full official canon of the greats of Western art -- let alone to the vagaries of modern and contemporary work -- she says that she had only the vaguest clue. Fine art was almost as remote to her as hip-hop is to the ganguro of Japan, and as attractive. As a little kid, she begged in vain to go to Catholic school, because -- "like a blockhead" -- she'd somehow gotten the idea that was where you went to learn to draw like Leonardo. In college she trained to be a physiotherapist, only to realize later that her interest in the human body had been aesthetic, not scientific, all along.
Once Brown finally got to art school -- after several starts and stops in more "sensible" careers -- she rushed to figure out high art. "It was like being in this constant sponge mode," she says. Ever since, she's made art about how people soak up foreignness of every kind.
After finishing in San Francisco in 1999, she moved on to the prestigious summer painting school in Skowhegan, Maine. There, Brown pulled a kind of reverse ganguro move that's not been noticed much. She read a book that got her interested in geisha culture, then started to paint self-portraits in the manner of Japanese courtesan prints. Those pictures showed her black skin covered in the same whiteface that geishas wear. In Brown's first art mixing Asian and black themes, that is, it was a matter of a black woman putting on the trappings of the East, rather than the other way around.
It was only later, after she'd begun grad work in the famous painting department at Yale, that Brown thought back on some photos of ganguro culture she'd seen years earlier and decided to take that as the subject of her work.
The pictures she's been making ever since aren't just about the strangeness of the Japanese adoption of hip-hop. Since they're painted fully in the manner of Japanese prints -- that's a big part of their visual appeal -- they're also about the strangeness of a black American artist fully adopting a Far Eastern style.
There's a third cultural gap on view in them as well. The work isn't only about the distance between ganguro and rap, or between Western and Eastern art. It's also about the distance between hip-hop, as the major market force it is today, and hip-hop as the radical art form that Brown first came to know and love.
In her earliest ganguro paintings, Brown saw hip-hop as giving the world's young people "a sense of liberation. . . . The grabbing of the crotch, the [expletive]-you attitude." But in her more recent work, there's a much more troubled take on things. Brown's blackface geishas now have the hip-hop style down as pat as any millionaire MC: They've got the gestures right, the hair, the attitude, the taste for Cartier and Courvoisier. And Brown says she feels a million miles from everything they represent. She's almost as far from all of that as any Japanese could be from hip-hop's ghetto roots.
Brown's very latest pictures are meant as powerful, direct expressions of her distaste. But it's not clear that her best-selling geisha imagery, with its notable wit and grace, can carry that much weight.
Art critic Jessica Dawson, reviewing Brown for this newspaper, felt "conflicting and confusing messages" in the artist's latest show at Gawlak's G Fine Art. There's also the worry that, after a full three years of ganguro art, Brown's career could go the way of so many others, endlessly repeating the idea that first won praise until it becomes an empty, if profitable, shtick.
Ironically, Brown's trip to Asia may be what it takes to unpaint her from the corner that her Asian themes have got her in. She's bringing along a video camera, with the thought that she might put away her brushes for a while. Long-term, she's even thinking of turning to abstraction, another cultural form she's always found profoundly foreign and that she says she's keen to someday make her own.
"I'm pretty much open to whatever happens. . . . I'm not sad that I'm coming to a point where these may be the last few [ganguro] paintings" is how a visit to her studio wraps up.
"Like I said, I never planned on doing any of this. . . . Going to art school was a shot in the dark. So is artmaking."
Iona Rozeal Brown's most recent work can be seen at www.gfineartdc.com. A selection of her earlier blackface work can be seen at www.spelman.edu/bush-hewlett/a3/gallery.html.
