April 16, 2025

Artist to Watch

LAKELA BROWN

LaKela Brown in her studio. Image courtesy of the artist and 56 Henry. 

NB: What are some of your earliest memories in art and how has it evolved to your practice today?

LB: Well, my very first art memory—I’ve thought about this because I did wonder how I got to this point—but my mother actually is my very first art memory. My mother was very talented, like much more naturally talented than I am, and she actually made my very first art memory. When I was little, I’m not even sure if I was fully speaking at this point, but I was hanging out with her in her bedroom, and she drew a picture of a dog, and I had never seen anybody draw a picture. I had no idea what she was doing, I didn’t know the word art or the word drawing. It was like magic to me. All I remember thinking at this point was “I want to be able to do that”. 

I didn’t know what art was, let alone it being a whole occupation that people have been, you know, doing for millennia before I came along.

LaKela Brown, Of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, 2024. Urethane resin. 32 x 22 x 11 in (81.2 x 55.8 x 27.9 cm)

NB: Can you walk us through your research process and some of the references that we see throughout your work?

LB: A lot of my references are not art-related and come from my life experience, others come directly from art history. For example, the most recent adornment work originated from walking through the Met and looking at these objects that I’ve seen multiple times, and suddenly having this epiphany about the ubiquity of certain images and how it’s everywhere. How it already has a meaning that’s been given to it and that we’ve accepted it.

Then I started thinking about objects that I had a personal relationship with but not just objects that are out in the world everywhere. Like walking through the Roman and Greek areas of the Met and seeing these columns—the Corinthian, Ionic, Doric—and wall reliefs and coins. Then walking through the Egyptian section and seeing the sunken reliefs and just realizing how this imagery is everywhere. So I would say a lot of my research is experiential, whether it was in art school studying these objects, or actually going to museums and interacting with them. I didn’t realize that I was building meaning beyond being a line cook at Roberta’s and interacting with these objects and sort of having these epiphanies about how they become culturally meaningful. 

Then there’s sort of the less experiential more academic research, looking up these objects and reading about them. 

LaKela Brown, Coverall Composition with Doorknocker Earrings, All Gold, Large, 2023. Plaster and acrylic. 45 x 33 x 4 in (114.3 x 83.8 x 10.2 cm)

NB: Can you speak a little bit about specifically the earrings, the collard greens, and the chicken heads?

LB: So I was speaking a second ago about ubiquity and thinking about objects that I was ‘given’ culturally and then thinking about other objects that maybe could relate to me, or could be symbolic of my thinking.

When you go to art school, you study Western art, and it is a lot about the history of things that men— European men in particular—were interested in, along with the stories that they were putting forth to talk about culture. These things then become very influential on how we view ourselves and what we think is important.

If you are a person that comes from any sort of marginalized identity, you start to wonder, when you study the art canon, where you fit into it. The earliest of these objects in my work was the earring, the door-knocker earrings, which is a particular kind of earring that was popularized by hip hop groups like Salt-N-Pepa, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and it is an object that I found is symbolic of a black woman. If you were walking down the street, and you found this object lying on the ground, it’s like it would have a whole story about the kind of person that this object belonged to, and that is how it became a subject in my work.

The collard greens came later. I was in a show called Elegies curated by Monique Long. She is the person who helped me understand that my work was a part of the still-life tradition. It didn’t occur to me immediately because when I think about still life and the history of still life, I think Dutch master painting, right? But I am using objects to communicate something in a very similar way that they were, and I wanted to think about how I could go beyond that and reinforce this idea of still life. 

Around that time I got an opportunity to work at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and study botany and I learned about this subdivision of botany called “ethnobotany” which is about how plants become culturally relevant. Once again, I thought about “what are some plants that I grew up with?” And that is how I landed on the collard green: The collard green is something that my grandmother has cooked my whole life, then my mother cooked, and now I cook. It is a leaf that you can grow for very little and you can grow it yourself, a hearty and very nutritious plant. So that is how this sort of still-life idea expanded into using plant matter.

LaKela Brown, Freestanding Inverted Bouquet with Four Pig Feet, 2024. Urethane resin. 19 ½ x 8 x 7 in (49.5 x 20.3 x 17.7 cm)

NB: Alright. So, when you begin working on a new piece, where do you begin? Do you have sketches? Do you go back and forth between working with material and your research? How does it work?

LB: It can depend—if it is a series that is already existing, then I am starting in my sketchbook, and I’m kind of working through compositions, just kind of like thinking about layout, where things are going to go, etc. I think part of becoming a professional artist is really understanding and settling into what it means to have a practice, and knowing what that’s going to look like for you. Once you get that— when you understand how you work— a large part of it is getting to know yourself. For me, a sketchbook is a way of working out problems before you commit bigger, more expensive materials. It is a way of recording an idea, like the way some writers use tape recorders and take voice memos.  You’re recording an idea in your sketchbook, and that idea can fluctuate sometimes. Right now I’m going into a high production mode, so I might go to sleep thinking about something or wake up thinking about it, or I might be walking down the street and get some sort of epiphany from something I saw so I put it all down on the sketchbook.  

Other times there is improvisation, because of the way that I work. For example, if I’m making impressions on a surface, I can  decide in the moment where I want those things to be. I think a lot about how Kiki Smith talks about moving an idea from the inside to the outside, something that starts internally in your head and then you take it out of your head, put it on the page, and then from the page to the sculpture

NB: But you still allow for magic as you approach the piece.

LB: Absolutely. I think you have to keep that flexibility and adaptation because only so much is in your control. The materials are subject to the environment, you know, and then the limitations of your knowledge and skill. Especially because I work with materials that are very environmentally sensitive, like plaster: If it’s hot, it’ll set faster. If it’s cold, it sets slower. Things that are in the water I’m using might affect how it sets and all these kinds of variables; how fast it cures, the clay, how hard it is, is based on the ambient temperature softening or hardening it, so you have to be flexible.

LaKela Brown, Large Embedded Doorknocker Earring Composition, 2024. Plaster. 45 1/4 x 33 1/2 x 2 7/8 in. (114.9 x 85.1 x 7.3 cm)

NB: Can you tell us about the work that is currently on view at the Met? Do you have any recent or upcoming projects, exhibitions that you’d like to share with us?

LB: It’s just wild every time I get to say that my work is in the Met. I walked into the Met and I saw my work, and it’s amazing how it went full circle from when I started making that work, which  was based on this epiphany that I had at the Met. I could say I’ve seen that kind of work in Philadelphia, or MFA Boston, and even at my own hometown museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts. Basically any major encyclopedic museum that has ancient Roman, Greek, and Egyptian works. But there was just this epiphany that happened at the Met.

This work that is at the Met is a 16 by 20 by relief. It has little tiny Nefertiti impressions of stamped Nefertiti heads that are about a 1/4 inch big. I just had this bag of beads from the materials for the arts, and so I was putting them on surfaces, making these little Nefertiti impressions. There’s almost this sort of “found art” record thing going on behind the scenes because there’s also some castings of King Tut heads, which come from this necklace and pendant I found walking down the street in Crown Heights. It had a King Tut head on a chain, so I picked it up, took it back to my studio, made a mold of it, and started making castings of it. But both those things were found. Then there’s were my own door-knocker earrings that I made,  when I was thinking about the appropriation of Egyptian imagery by hip-hop artists in the 1980s and 90s, which is all coming from this place of upliftment and aspiration – coming from a place of pride and wanting to positively associate blackness in America, which is so often associated with negativity—looking at my work as a way of controlling your own narrative and creating uplifting images. 

And so these objects already in themselves, have this embedded narrative and I felt like I didn’t have to bring any extra meaning to it. I was kind of free to play around with the composition and their form. This was all a part of an early series of work that I showed with Bridget Finn at Reyes Finn Gallery. It was my first show and my first art fair booth at NADA in Miami. I was in a two-person booth with Nikita Gale, who won the Perez Prize that year, so our booth just got all of this attention and it was really cool. Little did I know at the time that that work would end up in the show at the Met.

Then, Akili Tommasino, who is the curator of the show, had the work acquired by the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. He was a curator there at the time, and he was in the process of creating this show, but then he got the position at the Met, and so because that was his idea, he took his idea with him.

NB: And so what’s next?

LB: The biggest thing for me this year is going to be my solo exhibition with my gallery in New York, 56 Henry. I have some group shows coming up and I will also be in a two-person show with Mario Moore at the Library Street Collective in Detroit. And like I said, a smattering of group shows, but those are the two biggest things that I’m really, you know, that are conceptually pulling me right now.