Hi y'all. My name is Zeelie Brown. My first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama and the limestone walls of San Antonio. My work investigates the vernacular culture of the Black Gulf and Global South as a means of overcoming the legacies of genocidal white greed that threatens to drown our world.
Thank you for being here. If you would like to support my work, you can do so here: https://www.patreon.com/zeeliebrownlovesyou.
Statement
I'm interested in envisioning the healing potential of nature on land that my ancestors bled on. I want to merge the arts, in a way familiar to the communal rural lifeways that my grandparents gifted to me as a child through making music, prints, installations, sculptures and paintings that hold Black abstract articulations of wilderness. I'm interested in food and the ways we can embody medicine within communities. Food in community is a core form of sustaining my work.
Growing up, I could get collards from the folks down the road and the fire department brought baskets of produce that local farmers gathered from the first harvest to the old folks in town. Cooking revives that sometimes lost sense of community in a form of social sculpture that eventually finds its way into a space, a page, or a worn denim canvas. For my show Queer Mother’s Space, I honored that legacy, making a pyramid of pickled okra with peppers that I had grown and canned on my 6th story Manhattan balcony.
As someone who has struggled with hunger, it is vital to have food that people can take home with them at my shows. In this rural tradition, you would can your food after harvest in preparation for winter. In the hot July lull, old rags would be quilted together and turned into beautiful blankets. There was always enough to share. I wanted to represent this tradition in a gallery in the middle of the center of the capitalism that has worn away at the life and traditions of my family homestead. Through nurturing this sense of provision, I want to advocate for Black folks overcoming the mental and economic toll of the immediacy, surveillance, and colonialism by suggestion of late capitalism.
Bio
I studied Black performance, jazz cello and Black vernacular art at Oberlin College. I've been a Create Change Fellowship with the Laundromat Project, a Forge Fellow, a Climate Rising fellow at A Studio in the Woods, a FARMS apprentice at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an apprentice butcher at Fleishers, and Transjustice Community Fellow at the Audre Lorde Project. I've lectured at MIT, Tulane, York University, Beam Camp, and the University of Southern Illinois. I've performed at CACNO, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, El Museo Del Barrio, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, The Caribbean Cultural Center and Afro-Diasporic Institute, and Recess Gallery. I've mounted exhibitions at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Harvestworks, Elsewhere Museum, and Flux Factory and have been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Jerome Foundation, and Franklin Furnace.
Press