Marcus Brown
My mission is to create artworks that educate the public on important issues while crossing media and societal boundaries. As an artist with enslaved African ancestors, I feel a responsibility to use my work to tell their stories. To create new works that empower and bring everyone together. I see my role as an artist as a technical, scholarly, and performative one.
In making, I employ an African American and Creole tradition of using multiple media languages in the implementation of my work. In the same way a New Orleans chef sources multiple disparate ingredients to bring together a gumbo, I use visual, audio, performative, and interactive media in my work to create compositions that re-conceptualize and re-spiritualize contemporary culture. I am tempered by the musical traditions of my African American, Native, and European heritages.
“Art is a prayer in making. ”
“Chattel” by Marcus Brown
Business Ledger, W. H. Paxton, Enslaver, New Orleans, Louisiana
Working with a lithograph of Business Ledger, W. H. Paxton, Enslaver, New Orleans, Louisiana, artist Marcus Brown imagined what it would feel like to be treated as an object or commodity.
He asked himself, “What mantra would I sing? What rhythm would I beat? What sorrow would I bleed?”
When the shackles are gently touched, a song plays that was performed by the artist and vocalist, Leah Lonzo. By asking viewers to activate the work through the cold, rusted steel of the shackles, Brown aims to connect viewers to the representation of human beings as goods on a nineteenth-century spreadsheet.
The song lyrics “but not my soul” encourage viewers to consider the struggle for the enslaved to exist.