Aya Brown
(b. 1995)Visual artist Aya Brown creates drawings that highlight the economic and social crises that occur beyond and within her Brooklyn community. Her works incite conversation on issues such as workplace conditions, queerness, gender pay equity, and racial politics.
Biography
Ever since she was a young girl, Brown centered drawing as her preferred artistic practice. Her works focus on documenting the lives and faces of everyday, queer Black and brown people.
Brown was born into an artistic family—several family members are musicians. Her maternal great-grandmother also owned a kimono factory in Japan that specialized in hand embroidery.
While in her BFA program at Cooper Union, Brown credits the trauma she experienced as a Black woman in the program with pushing her to leave the school in 2017. However, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown was admitted to the emergency room and noticed a Black West Indian nurse who took care of her during her recovery. Citing this instance as a point of inspiration for her drawings of essential workers, Brown began to make nurses, street vendors, caretakers, and MTA employees as the core subjects of her drawings. Using Prismacolor pencils and pastel on Kraft paper, her nine-by-twelve-inch drawings encourage dialogues surrounding labor, race, gender, and queer identity. In Virgil Abloh’s Public Domain Project, her works were seen across New York City, including the facade of the Central Library of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Kingsborough Houses in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, and bus stops of the B15, B45, B44, B8, B6, and B74 lines. The Studio Museum in Harlem first acquired her work in 2020.
Aya Brown
(b. 1995)Visual artist Aya Brown creates drawings that highlight the economic and social crises that occur beyond and within her Brooklyn community. Her works incite conversation on issues such as workplace conditions, queerness, gender pay equity, and racial politics.
Biography
Ever since she was a young girl, Brown centered drawing as her preferred artistic practice. Her works focus on documenting the lives and faces of everyday, queer Black and brown people.
Brown was born into an artistic family—several family members are musicians. Her maternal great-grandmother also owned a kimono factory in Japan that specialized in hand embroidery.
While in her BFA program at Cooper Union, Brown credits the trauma she experienced as a Black woman in the program with pushing her to leave the school in 2017. However, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown was admitted to the emergency room and noticed a Black West Indian nurse who took care of her during her recovery. Citing this instance as a point of inspiration for her drawings of essential workers, Brown began to make nurses, street vendors, caretakers, and MTA employees as the core subjects of her drawings. Using Prismacolor pencils and pastel on Kraft paper, her nine-by-twelve-inch drawings encourage dialogues surrounding labor, race, gender, and queer identity. In Virgil Abloh’s Public Domain Project, her works were seen across New York City, including the facade of the Central Library of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Kingsborough Houses in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, and bus stops of the B15, B45, B44, B8, B6, and B74 lines. The Studio Museum in Harlem first acquired her work in 2020.