Bebonkwe Brown ᐱᐳᐣ | Urban Skins & Ancient Kin

Urban Skins & Ancient Kin

December 11, 2023 – July 22, 2024 (extended date)
Brooklyn Heights Public Library
286 Cadman Plaza W, Brooklyn, NY 11201
exhibition open during library hours

opening reception December 14, 5:30-7:30 pm
with artist introduction to the exhibition artworks at 6pm
and amphitheater slideshow on display all evening.
Reception is open to the public.

Walking the City, Wahkohtowin-Style
artist talk at exhibition site ampitheatre
July 22, 2pm
free & open to the public
scroll to bottom of page to see flyer

This exhibition is presented as part of the BKPL Heritage Ambassador program

gathering 4220 (call me) 2023
digital photo-based painting & 3D printed arrowheads on canvas.
40 x 40″

For more than 35 years, Bebonkwe Brown’s trailblazing creative practice has centered and celebrated matriarchal Amerindian cultural, artistic, and decolonization practices, while incorporating Western iconography, artistic genres, language, media and technology into artworks. Her focus in more recent years on painting involves avant-garde continuations of ancestral Plains First Nation’s fem-centric abstraction and adornment practices.

Urban Skins & Ancient Kin exhibits a selection of photo-based paintings from the nikihk and gatherings series, dramatically installed across the expansive south wall of Brooklyn Heights Main Hall. Featuring eloquent layers of painterly abstract urban photographs, tribal geometries and culturally significant three dimensional adornments, these pieces embody longstanding Indigenous land-based practices within the hyper-urban environment of Lenapehoking (a.k.a NYC). Throughout her 18 years based in Brooklyn, the artist has been gathering both lens-based imagery and physical materials as part of a traditional gathering practice involving walking the urban landscape, observation, and reciprocity practices. She then employs reverential yet pointed combinations of natural and salvaged materials with Western technological elements, such as digital photographs and 3D-printed objects.

Bebonkwe’s use of photography to create expressionistic abstract artworks is one of numerous layers in her re/Indiginization of Western art histories, genres and arts practices. The “photo-based paintings” (artist’s term) in Urban Skins & Ancient Kin are all composed of either individual photographs or photographs layered with themselves or others. Some are left as is, others are altered and/or collaged with image processing software in a process closely aligned with Bebonkwe’s physical painting process.

The expressionism, grittiness, gesturality and urban elements present in these images show a strong affinity and dialogue with abstract expressionism and it’s strong history and mythology in New York City. Yet on a more fundamental level this and other elements and conversations contained in Bebonkwe’s ‘neo-Indigenous’ abstraction advocate for Native women’s much longer history of creating sophisticated abstraction, and the entangled history of the Western art world’s pervasive dismissal of this, along with the influence of these femcentric Indigenous practices on Western abstraction, particularly within the colonized First Nations territories of North America.

Bebonkwe’s use of the lens to create abstract work extends her use of digital media to exemplify cultural continuance and ingenuity. She does this both in the abstraction itself and by positing the camera as a vehicle for seeing and framing from a holistic, spirit-centered way. Her photo-based works are literally painterly, talismanic artifacts of looking at the world through an Indigenous, matriarchally focused lens in which the documentary and figurative elements so heavily centered in Western photography have been largely excused from the frame. She uses photography to create a form of abstract, non-linear urban storytelling that mirrors wahkohtowin kinship practices and Nêhiyawak ceremony.

Like the exhibition artworks, the term ‘Urban Skin’ is layered. It is Bebonkwe’s name for the expressive surfaces of a city she engages with as a living entity and creative collaborator, who’s visual voice contains both human and non-human mark-making. She interacts with the urban land with the understanding that it is as alive and inhabited by Ancestors and Relatives as in any other place.

The word ‘Skin’ also has a colonial history as a derogatory word for a Native person yet has been reclaimed and repositioned as an affectionate name Native people sometimes call one another. So ‘Urban Skin’ is also a name, both playful and pained, for a Native person living within the city, referencing the deep relationship between person, city, and their tribal and colonial histories.

Some Urban Skins & Ancient Kin artworks are further layered into tribal geometries, the chevrons and fields of circles containing cultural meaning, practice, and adornment traditions, now rendered in digital media. Some pieces include snippets of language, adding to the artist’s interactive narrative with the city and creating a dialogue with the library as a container of predominantly Settler-written word and histories. They also personify the long-standing, layered incorporations of language, wordplay, and the dichotomies of written and oral cultures in Bebonkwe’s work.

The city-gathered physical elements adorning some pieces are also rooted in traditional First Nations culture. They include Cree and Lenape plant and animal relatives and food sources, sometimes painted to appear metallic, or printed as 3D objects. Others are hand-collected street refuse, repositioned as tribal iconography. All are metaphoric of cultural and environmental damage, relationship, and recovery.

The position of city-based Indigenous artists and the kinship and decolonization practices embodied in the artworks in Urban Skins & Ancient Kin are particularly relevant in this moment and location, while acknowledging the work of these artists is long overdue. With eco crisis having reached a point of high visibility and escalation, and the majority of both First Nations and Settler populations now living in urban centers, re/membering sustainable relationship with the land within urban centers is crucial. And yet most cities’ design and dominant culture/s exemplify and deepen disconnection with the Earth. Although statistics confirm that Native people’s already exceptionally heavy challenges usually escalate when living in urban settings, those Indigenous urban artists who practice their cultures are simultaneously in the unique and invaluable position of carrying cultural knowledge, perspectives, and creative vision that is keystone to rebalancing good relationship with our planet, especially when living in the city.

Contained in the highly contemporary and combinatory approach of Bebonkwe’s work is a deeply traditional one that embodies Native cultural resilience, through the ‘good medicine’ of creativity, beauty, innovation, and tenacity.

See additonal exhibitions here.