Adrienne Brown-David
Artist Statement
It’s difficult to create a stationary box in which my work fits. I am at my core, a figurative artist. The living form has always been at the center of the work. But, my work, like life, grows and evolves based on my growth and evolution. Each piece is colored by my experiences, emotions, thought processes, observations and movement through the world. For the bulk of my adult life, motherhood has greatly influenced my work. The act of raising children has given me an opportunity to examine the evolution of childhood through a lens of understanding. An understanding of how the world will view black youth and the effect that will have on the development of my children. The understanding has driven me to create an environment which has allowed my children the freedom to grow up at their own pace. Much of my work centers around this nucleus. As the children grow, the work grows. It is easy to find beauty in a cherub faced child running free in a bright, southern landscape. But what happens when that same child is moody, or adorned with perfectly coiffed edges and piercings? What happens when the jump ropes and swings are traded for cell phones and eyeliner? Can we still find beauty in those moments of change? Do we still embrace a freedom that feels less innocent? Do we embrace a child that looks like mine, an adult shell around a child’s core? What happens to that free, black child through the years of their development? How do they move through the adult world? How do they carry themselves? How do they view the world around them? Do you still these the beauty in their adult freedom or does it morph into something else? My work seeks to explore all of these questions without attempting to answer them. It is a quest to highlight the quiet beauty of our humanness and how that humanness is received by the world at large.
“. . . my work, like life, grows and evolves based on my growth and evolution. Each piece is colored by my experiences, emotions, thought processes, observations and movement through the world.”
