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Unfolding as both an archive and an origin story, this publication marks the first institutional monograph dedicated to Detroit-born artist LaKela Brown, whose sculptural reliefs translate the language of adornment into an aesthetic of memory, intimacy, and cultural lineage. Brown's plaster casts and gilded surfaces echo the textures of jewelry, bamboo earrings, rope chains, hair braids, and domestic patterns—motifs drawn from Black aesthetics and everyday life. Through composition, touch, and repetition, she transforms these symbols of identity and style into a visual vocabulary that honors embodied experience and cultural inheritance. Essays by Rhea L. Combs, Jessica Kenyatta Walker, and Jova Lynne bring together perspectives from Black feminist theory, curatorial practice, and contemporary art to frame Brown's work within longer genealogies of Black material culture and expressive labor, tracing the ways Brown's sculptural gestures mirror the intricate processes through which stories and aesthetics are passed across generations.
LaKela Brown, a graduate of the College for Creative Studies, has participated in solo and group exhibitions globally. Her work resides in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, and the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago. Rhea L. Combs is currently the Senior Curatorial Fellow in Global and Contemporary Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Jova Lynne is a practicing artist, cu rator, and the inaugural artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Jessica Kenyatta Walker is assistant professor of American culture and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.
- Publisher: Distributed
- Publish Date: Oct 6, 2026
- Pages: 84
- Language: English
- Type: Hardcover
- EAN/UPC: 9798992545098
- Dimensions: 14 in H | 10 in W
- BISAC Categories: Arts & Hobbies
