“Saint-Paul-de-Venice” (The Beginning of my life/Allegory of a shipwreck)

Bentley Brown is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and adjunct professor of studio art and art history at Fordham University and the Parsons School of Design. He is the former curatorial director of the Brooklyn College Art Gallery, where his curated exhibitions included the first survey of works by pioneering photographer and historian of Black photography Deborah Willis.

As an art historian, his research explores the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s.

In his artistic practice, inspired by African American cultural production, Brown employs abstract and figurative expressionist approaches to the artistic process, utilizing mediums such as canvas, found objects, photo collage, photography, and film to explore themes of Black identity, cosmology, and American interculturalism.

PC: Justice Kelley