Adrienne Brown-David is an artist living and working in North Mississippi, whose work explores – among other things – individual, familial, and collective identity as informed by society and nature. She studied for a time at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she began experimenting with a variety of styles and media. She taught art in St. Louis, Missouri and further developed her artistic process in the U.S. Virgin Islands, before settling in Mississippi with her family. Her figurative and portrait work focuses heavily on the experiences of her four daughters, through which Brown-David interprets the Southern landscape and humanity’s place within it.
THIS LAND is funded in part by a grant from South Arts with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support provided by the Mississippi Arts Commission.
Much of Brown-David's gallery and museum work depicts her daughters as they assert agency within the Southern landscape.
(The horizontal image above is from a project at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, in which contemporary artists were invited to create work that added new color, shape, and interpretation to monochromatic block print designs made by Walter Anderson in the 1940s.)
"Despite the fact that their childhood looks very different environmentally, societally their childhood is going to be very similar... Black and brown children tend to be read as older, as less innocent.... And people say it thinking it's some sort of compliment without understanding that what they're actually doing is squashing my small child’s childhood. "