Brandon Donahue-Shipp
EXPO CHICAGO ‘23
A life-long appreciator of street art, pop art, and Arte
Povera, Memphis-born, Baltimore-based multimedia artist Brandon Donahue-Shipp employs assemblage, airbrushing, and spray painting to trick out everyday objects and materials. Sports equipment and culture have been a key element to his practice for many years.
Basketball Bloom (LES), found basketballs and shoestrings, 48x36”, 2019
His iconic Basketball Blooms resemble floral blooms emerging from the surface of the wall, lending an organic, natural quality to the prosaic, manufactured basketballs. Emanating wonder and delight, these striking sculptural objects often reference the sacred geometry of the mandala or flowers blossoms as symbols of universal connection and rebirth.
Basketball Bloom (Maryland TF-1000)
NO LOOK PASS installation shot, 2018
In Coach’s Playbook, a new series of screenprints, Donahue-Shipp’s hybrid basketball judicial court features red and blue arrows, X’s, and numbers of team plays and strategies. In this parallel, Donahue incorporates key players to determine “fair play”: referees and a judge, commentators, a court reporter, a 12-person jury and spectators, coaches and legal counsel.
Donahue-Shipp’s playful diagram of two opposing teams’ strategies in an All-American color palette criticizes a system founded in fairness that more often than not bears witness to the most unjust endgames.
Coaches Playbook, screenprint on clipboard, 21x27.5”, 2023
Brandon Donahue-Shipp was born in Memphis and lives and works in Baltimore. He received an MFA from the University of Tennessee and his BFA from Tennessee State University. He was included in Common Practice: Basketball and Contemporary Art by Carlos Rolon. Donahue has had recent solo exhibitions in Nashville at Vanderbilt University, Oz Arts, and Seed Space; Wrather West Kentucky Museum, KY; and Athica Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, GA; and numerous group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. He has received numerous awards, honors, grants, and residencies, and his work is in the collections of nexAir, Memphis; Tennessee State University, Nashville; The University of Tennessee Knoxville, Ewing Gallery, Knoxville, TN; and Toyota of Franklin, TN.