Jordan Derron Brown (b. 1996) is a visual artist, poet, and performer based in Baltimore, MD. His interdisciplinary practice in sculpture, installation, textile, video and collage assembles personal mythologies from old clothing, text, and found objects. He has recently exhibited his work with Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Center (Chicago, IL), CulturalDC (Washington, D.C.), and Gallery T293 (Rome, Italy). He was a Spring 2024 resident at Blue Light Junction (Baltimore, MD) and a 2023-2024 In-Session fellow with Threewalls (Chicago, IL.) He is one-fourth of the Chicago-based performance art collective Suspended Culture. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Artist Statement
I am a queer Black American visual artist, poet, performer and educator. Having studied creative writing, contemporary dance, literature and sculpture, I think of myself as a multimedia storyteller. I am inspired by puppetry, cartoons, fashion, DJing/remix culture, and quilting as different kinds of masquerade performance–using objects in an alchemical way to conjure up stories. I create textile, video and paper collages that function as vignettes from a larger story about Black healing, self-discovery, relationships and community. The materials I work with are sourced primarily from my own archive or my community’s archive –sometimes literally, in the form of outgrown clothing, old fabric, or diary entries, and sometimes more poetically, in the form of objects of memory, stories, or things I recall from dreams. My work with these materials is a way of grieving the past, but also of imagining future selves and/or unwritten stories.
I think of my work as an extension of traditions of Black American storytelling, folklore and mythology, where objects and characters from the community memory take on magical and hyperreal aspects. I love to blend the realm of my imagination with the concrete realities of this world, often leaning into cartoon depictions of body parts, faces, and contorted figures. I try to create work that is open enough to activate the viewers’ memory or imagination, and then to question the distinction between them.
