Hebru Brantley | Forced Field

HEBRU BRANTLEY FORCED FIELD ELMHURST ART MUSEUM

HEBRU BRANTLEY creates narrative driven work

revolving around his conceptualized iconic characters. Brantley utilizes these iconic characters to address complex ideas around nostalgia, the mental psyche, power and hope. The color palettes, pop-art motifs and characters themselves create accessibility around Brantley’s layered and multifaceted ideas. Majorly influenced by the South Side of Chicago’s Afro Cobra movement in the 1960s and 70s, Brantley uses the lineage of mural and graffiti work as a frame to explore his inquiries. Brantley applies a plethora of mediums from oil, acrylic, watercolor and spray paint to non-traditional mediums such as coffee and tea. Brantley’s work challenges the traditional view of the hero or protagonist. His work insists on a contemporary and distinct narrative that shapes and impacts the viewer’s gaze.

Recognized nationally for public works and solo shows in Chicago, Hebru Brantley has exhibited in London, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles and New York including Art Basel Switzerland, Art Basel Miami, Scope NYC and Frieze London. Brantley has been recognized in publications including the Chicago Tribune, Complex Magazine and NY Post. His work has been collected by Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel,The Pritzker Family and power couple Jay-Z and Beyonce. Brantley has collaborated with brands like Nike, Hublot and Adidas. Brantley earned a B.A. in Film from Clark Atlanta University, and has a background in design and media illustration.

“FORCED FIELD”

HEBRU BRANTLEY Hebru Brantley is known for his upbeat murals and high profile collectors including Jay-Z and Beyonce, Lenny Kravitz, Rahm Emanuel and filmmaker George Lucas. He creates work which may initially appear naive, but as in many childhood tales (think Brothers Grimm), there is a cautionary subtext. The exhibition Forced Field represents a departure into darker territory. The cinematic installation of new work is layered with Afrofuturism, magic realism, and religious overtones.

Brantley has not been shy about citing his influences, his aspirations and his efforts to move his artistic practice into a variety of media and platforms. In an interview with Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, better known as Lupe Fiasco, Brantley said that in ten years he’d like to be known as “a respected, well-established visual artist. A maker of many things. A filmmaker. A visionary. Dare I might say—though I am not this person, names might be thrown around—like a young, or a more handsome, black Walt Disney. [Laughs] A more handsome, African-American Jim Henson. So again, the greater vision is yet to come and to bring that world forth to people in different mediums, not just painting.” (Michigan Avenue magazine, June 29, 2015) Brantley’s work is often best understood in the context of filmic narratives. He studied film at Clark Atlanta University, and his interest in developing recognizable and recurring characters and placing them in episodic narratives derives from that practice. Brantley encourages the viewer to experience the exhibition Forced Field as a film in three acts, with an expository first act, conflict in the second act, and resolution in the third act.

Flyboy is the character for which Brantley is best known--he has called him “my Mickey Mouse”--and he is central throughout Forced Field. A figure of indeterminate age and fluid ethnicity, possessing the real or imaginary power of flight, Flyboy blends Brantley’s interest in Afrofuturism with the influence of Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain America.

| FORCED FIELD Brantley uses Flyboy as an avatar of human resilience in his various exhibitions, such as his solo show at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2014. That exhibition featured Flyboy with his acolytes--made of equal parts X-Men and the four apostles--who showed an emotional range of “optimism and pessimism and their place in the journey from Light to Dark.” (Flyboy is inescapably recognizable in the goggles which conceal his gaze, making him a metaphor for the false familiarity of fame and an embodiment of the artist’s stated wish to look without being seen. Flyboy may be read as an alter ego of sorts for the artist, who at 6’ 8” is always the most visible person in the room.)

The innocence and optimism embodied in Flyboy is often overlaid with deeper, more complicated associations, as is true with much of Brantley’s work. The inspiration for Flyboy draws upon the history of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of pioneering African-American World War II military pilots who trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field, and were educated at Tuskegee University, a historically black college in Alabama. With his goggles and magical power of flight, always moving forward, Flyboy would seem to symbolize the ability to overcome all obstacles.

Brantley references symbolic boundaries through a fence installation in the galleries. It signals Brantley’s understanding and transgression of the American ideal of the white picket fence as a social construct designed to keep everyone in place. “Don’t go beyond that space.

Don’t strive for more or better.’ His painting The Barrel, reinforces that theme by utilizing a colloquial expression sometimes referenced in African American communities, “crabs in a barrel,” to describe a group of disadvantaged people who work to hold back any individual member of their community who try to climb to success outside the community.

As a self-professed Afrofuturist, Brantley’s work is part of a spectrum of visual, performing and literary artists who combine “elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs.” (Ytasha Womack, ‘Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture’, 2013, p.

9). Afrofuturism explores the effects of diaspora, both extra-continental and extra-planetary, and the resulting alienation as seen in films like ‘Brother From Another Planet’ and ‘The Matrix’ series, the music of Parliament and Funkadelic, Sun Ra, Solange, Janelle Monae, Missy Elliot and Outkast, the science fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany and the work of visual artists like Brantley and Nick Cave.

The term Afrofuturism as a critical construct was first coined by Mark Dery, in his essay ‘Black to the Future’ for a collection of essays of which he was the editor, ‘Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture,’ (Duke University Press, 1994). Dery was among the first to link the transatlantic slave trade with the metaphor of alien abduction. Dery wrote comparing the atrocities of racism experienced by blacks in the United States “ to a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movement ; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies...the Tuskegee experiment...comes readily to mind.” (Womack, p. 32)

Brantley places his creative amanuensis, Flyboy, on a funeral bier surrounded by mourning doppelgängers, creating a sculptural grouping reminiscent of the woodland funeral scene of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or a medieval depiction of the Lamentation of Christ. Although Flyboy is shown reanimated and running in the final gallery the artist leaves us guessing what force or event brought about his resurrection.

The artist speaks obliquely of Flyboy’s “emancipation,” both symbolic from “the history of African Americans in America” and physical, from the “confinement [of] people living on the South Side of Chicago [who] will not go past a certain point [through] ignorance or fear. Chicago is an extremely segregated city”. Forced fields, indeed.

--Jenny Gibbs, Guest Curator Jenny Gibbs, currently Program Director at Sotheby’s Institute of ArtNew York, was Executive Director of Elmhurst Art Museum (20142017) and Dean of Graduate Programs at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2010-2013).

Elmhurst Art Museum 150 S. Cottage Hill Avenue, Elmhurst IL 60126 (630) 834-0202 | www.elmhurstartmuseum.org Exhibition will be on view between September 9, 2017 - January 7, 2018 Exhibition generously sponsored by the Explore Elmhurst Grant Program @hebrubrantley | hebrubrantley.com