Dear Aya Brown...
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 43 seconds. Contains 944 words
Dear Aya,
From one lesbian to another, I am so grateful for your work. It’s incredibly validating to see the work that you do. The LGBT community has so much to offer, and I bet your impact is going to be sending out ripples for a helluva long time.
I was getting my regular dose of Pod Save The People on my commute home from work a few weeks ago, when the discussion shifted to the work of Aya Brown. They were describing her latest project of honoring the Black and Brown nurses working endless hours during the pandemic in the form of color pencil, full-body portraits. I had seen a fair amount of artworks through my job that honored the essential workers during 2020 and beyond that all had their own special touch, but Aya Brown’s portraiture sounded like something that I had to look into as soon as I could.
Aya Brown is a queer artist based in Brooklyn, New York, whose drawing skills have been in bloom since childhood. Being half-Japanese, she was inspired to recreate anime and manga characters that reflected herself. (1) Brown and her ongoing artistic practice has been featured in numerous publications, including but not limited to; Teen Vogue, Office Magazine, Artsy, Vulture, Vogue, and Cultured. She also collaborated with fashion brand MadeMe for their 2019 Pride Collection, featuring her illustrations on hoodies, t-shirts, and intimates. Other brands include Girls Only and Ghetto Gastro. (2)
Much of Brown’s subject matter are the prominent women of color in her life, drawn on brown paper as opposed to white paper to better represent them. Her drawings are relatively simple in concept, with figures often positioned in a blank space either solo, with a partner, or an object of furniture. These compositions, however, leave plenty of room for free expression of queer intimacy, incredible tone and color depth, and confident mark-making with color pencil that provide a space for an entire spectrum of lived experiences. Brown actively challenges the use of traditional materials used to create her drawings ties into this practice, specifically utilizing brown craft paper for her adoration of how the color changes over time, much like that of the change in skin with age.
“I use brown paper because the art school standard, or when you buy paper to put in your printer, when you sign a contract, when you look at your email - everything begins on white’ she says. ‘For me, when I’m drawing these Black women, I don’t want them to come from whiteness. Things do not need to start from white, this brown paper, this colour that looks like our skin, is totally valid.” - www.wallpaper.com
In early 2020, Brown went art world viral with her Essentials Workers series: color pencil portraits honoring the Black women in her community, working the essential jobs that keep her city, and much of the country, going. Public transportation workers, security guards, postal service workers, hospital employees, and all in between are included. After being furloughed from her own employer and a hospital visit where she was taken care of by predominantly Black and Brown women, she set out to create a series that reflected and honored “their sexuality, strength, style, bodies, joy, and edge.” (3) Ultimately, this particular body of work was a way to bring awareness towards the dynamics of those working the front lines, and to uplift those working in the roles.
“My goal is to uplift Black women who look like me and inspire me — to give them a space to be seen and to bring awareness to them,” - www.nytimes.com
“I really value these women... know how important they are to our community, to all communities. They work in all hospitals and they always have. That’s kind of where this all started.
Brown pays special attention to the appearance of these women, adorning them in gold bracelets and earrings, some with long nails and bright sneakers. “A lot of my homegirls went to nursing school, and I know how fly they are,” Brown said. This isn’t just for the sake of aesthetics, but also to honor the individual personalities of each of these women. - https://www.artsy.net
I could write for hours about how impactful Aya Brown’s work is. Between the lovingly rendered scenes of Black queer intimacy, and her essential worker portraits that reflect a sincerity that can be tricky to come by in contemporary art, I’ve been unable to look away from her portfolio for days. Her choice of brown paper, and what that choice means for her, really got my gears going. Through much of my artistic career, especially during my years at a private art school, I never would have equated starting on white paper as the default in absolution. And yet, that is where a majority of our artwork starts. It makes complete sense to me that Brown would not want these portraits to ‘come from whiteness’, as it’s a choice that challenges the notion that whiteness does not have to be the point in which all things come from. It’s a perspective that has changed my approach to viewing the beginnings of a piece of art, and I think is changing the perspective of others, too.
I cannot implore my readers enough to read the articles on Aya Brown’s work in their entirety. “Special” does not nearly cover the quality of these works enough, but for now it’s all I can muster.
- Sasha
FOLLOW AND SUPPORT AYA BROWN
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/nyregion/black-women-essential-workers.html