Email: davisgallery@hws.edu
Phone: (315) 781-3487
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Dr. Anna Wager
Visual Arts Curator
Department of Art and Architecture
wager@hws.edu
(315) 781-3483
Curated by Hope Lee
Davis Gallery, March 5-April 25, 2021
Artist’s Talk: Friday, March 5, 7 p.m. via Zoom
Zoom link
Better than Good features twenty-five works from Maryland-based artist Nakeya Brown’s photographic series that engage with the themes of identity, representation, and beauty standards in contemporary American culture. Through her deployments of the conventions of still-life and portraiture, Brown’s photographs challenge the traditional parameters of those genres while capturing that which is often excluded from them: black female subjectivity, memory, and experience. Brown’s art inspired the partner exhibition, Hair Stories Untold, which will be housed in the Solarium gallery, next door to the Davis. These exhibitions are intended to be in conversation with one another, to multiply the perspectives and create even greater visibility for the issue that ties them together: racialized beauty standards. Importantly, they also celebrate the joy, intimacy, resilience, and creativity of Black hair as it is experienced by those who live it.
Nakeya Brown is a conceptual photographer whose work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally including shows at the Catherine Eldman Gallery, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, The McKenna Museum of African American Art, and the NOW Gallery in London. Her photographs have also appeared in TIME, New York magazine, The New Yorker, and Vice, among others. Brown received her undergraduate degree in Visual Arts and Journalism & Media Studies from Rutgers University and her MFA from George Washington University.
Exhibition co-sponsored by The Davis Gallery, Department of Art + Architecture, Africana Studies and Media & Society Departments, Intercultural Affairs Center, Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and William Smith Dean’s Office.
Nakeya Brown, "Shower Crown Royal” from the series Hair Stories Untold, archival inkjet print, 2014 (24” x 30”)