Rozeal brings together Asian and African-American aesthetic traditions in diverse, multimedia paintings and collages, fusing imagery of Japanese woodcutting, geishas, and kabuki with modern hip-hop and vogue-ing figures.
Iona Rozeal Brown is a contemporary American painter best known for her use of traditional ukiyo-e print techniques to meld Japanese folklore, geisha, kabuki, and samurai imagery with hip-hop references and African-American culture.
The visual conventions of Japanese ukiyo-e and shunga, the Japanese tradition of erotic art, play a strong role in Rozeal's body of work, “Coupledom,” which is laden with intimacy. Her earlier blackface series mines the rich cross-cultural territory of ganguro and burapan, a subculture of Japanese adolescents that sports tanned skin, bright makeup, blonde wigs, and gold chains, in order to model themselves after the stereotypical African-American hip-hop look. According to many sources, the word ganguro translates to “blackface.”
The paintings of the last decade feature embracing couples, each assigned to their own cozy atmosphere (sometimes referred to as a pod). Luxury accessories like strands of pearls and oversized gold jewelry are collaged throughout the compositions, as are walls of speakers. From a series loosely called “All I Ever Wanted . . . (My God . . . my man!),” inspired by the Lenny Kravitz/SeanTaro Ono Lennon tune “All I Ever Wanted,” most of the works are titled with an accompanying haiku as well scripture from The Song of Songs.
The artist’s revisiting of [Japanese artist Kitagawa] Utamaro’s imagery and shunga, the erotic prints of late–Edo Japan, sparked the series’ focus on representations of sensuality and sexuality. Even today, the artist posits, these themes are often presented as merely a barrage of images, leaving nothing to the imagination.
Rozeal earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Yale University in 2002, and has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C.
Rozeal's work has been exhibited around the world. She has been featured in a number of solo exhibitions at numerous galleries and institutions including:
- A3 Black on Both sides (2004) at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts
- Iona Rozeal Brown: Matrix 152 (2004) exhibited at Wadsworth Atheneum
- The Paintings of Iona Rozeal Brown (2007) at the University of Arizona Museum of Art
- All Falls Down (2010) at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
- Introducing… The House of Bando (2012) in New York, NY at Salon 94
- iROZEALb (2014) at the Joslyn Art Museum
In addition to the numerous solo exhibitions Rozeal's artwork has been featured in, her work is permanently on display at the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
National Gallery of Art
North Carolina Museum of Art
This artist is now going by Rozeal.
