Mark Anthony Brown Jr. (b. 1991), is a journeyman of sorts. Not dedicated to a single given location for too long, he currently lives and works between Cincinnati, Ohio, Durham, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. Mark has received a Bachelor of Science Technology from Bowling Green State University and is currently in pursuit of a MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where also is a fellow in Museum Practice at The Ackland Art Museum.
Mark’s art practice is research driven and interdisciplinary; utilizing photography, sculpture, drawing and painting with an interest vernacular aesthetic practices & sensibilities, the manifestation of African retentions in the diaspora, semiotics and archival practices.
His work has been exhibited nationally; including the Cincinnati Art Museum, Mint Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia and Block Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina. Mark has received various fellowships and awards including an Emerging Lens Fellowship from ArtWORKS in Chicago (2022), the Nexus Grant from Atlanta Contemporary (2022), and a Visiting Researcher Fellowship at Wilson Special Collection Library at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2023).
Mark Anthony Brown Jr. is available for assignments, commissions and exhibiting opportunities in the continental U.S. and abroad.
M: markanthonybrownjr.us@gmail.com
P: +1-678-653-1105
Artist Statement
I am an interdiscplinary artist that engages heavily with photography as my anchoring medium. Themes and interests within my work vary; counter/histories, aesthetics, materials, perceptions, and the intersection of the overarching human experience and the Black experience. I work heavily with archives, “found” photographs, and more historically conventional methods of photography like portraiture and landscape photography; in addition to video, “found” objects and materials
The guiding framework for my art practice is constructed from the idea of A Black Gaze. This gaze is directly oppositional yet simultaneously in conversation with what has come to be naturalized as the standard, white gaze present in art, media, and other aspects of culture, but it’s not an attempt to be a Black version of it. A Black Gaze does not describe the viewpoint of Black people; it is not a depiction of Black people or black culture. It’s a type of oppositional gaze, a critical framework that forces viewers to engage blackness from a complex, polyvalent, and often discomforting vantage point. The structure of viewing positions the viewer in relation to the precarity of blackness and requires active labor to engage with the work.
If A Black Gaze is the framework for my art practice, then I would consider the critical fabulation as the methodology that brings the work to fruition. “‘Fabula’ denotes the basic elements of story, the building blocks of the narrative.” Further, fabulation consists of telling impossible stories to amplify the impossibility of their telling. It’s an act of respecting the limits of the archive while remaking it in the process. My work is heavily intertwined with (photographic) archives, whether it be family archives, a “found” photo archive, or archives housed at an institution– in my art practice, the fabula or building blocks of the narrative are the photographs and materials that make up the archive. By the re-arrangement, re-structuring, and re-interpreting of these photographs, I am working in the direction of “imagin(ing) what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.”