Iona Rozeal Brown, a3 #11, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and G Fine Art, Washington, DC

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The 2007 Richard C. Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship has been awarded to SFAI alumna Iona Rozeal Brown. Born in 1966 in Washington, DC, Brown took a BS in Kinesiological Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1991. She studied at the Pratt Institute before coming to SFAI to pursue a BFA in painting, which she earned in 1999. Brown was the valedictorian of her class at SFAI and the recipient of an SFAI-conferred summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. After SFAI, she took an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2002.
In her work as a painter (she is also an accomplished DJ), Brown takes what has become a commonplace motif in contemporary art and culture-the representation of race and gender-and transmutes it into a richly articulated, synchronic study of the global appropriation and fetishization of African American culture, in particular, hip-hop. In an ongoing series of works and exhibitions that were first elicited, conceptually, by an article she read in 1997, Brown deploys and then revisits a theme of her own devising called "a3" or "Afro-Asiatic allegory." The article in question-"The Yellow Negro" by Joe Wood-addresses a fad then on the rise in Japan: youths who practice a contemporary version of blackface or ganguro. Equal parts intrigued and disturbed by the phenomenon, Brown eventually made her way to Japan in 2001 to explore it firsthand as well as to research Japanese woodblock prints from the Edo period (1603–1868). Lire la suite http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=20378