Jillian Marie Browning: Artist and Educator
The Albany Museum of Art’s most recent acquisition is From the Ground Up (2023) by Jillian Marie Browning. Browning (b.1989) is an interdisciplinary artist pursuing themes of feminism, identity, and the contemporary black experience.
Made of cotton material, the work is in the cyanotype medium. This process is done by coating a surface in a chemical solution, placing a photographic negative on the surface, and exposing it to ultraviolet rays to create an image. From The Ground Up, in particular, is a work consisting of images of a patch of sugarcane outside the artist’s childhood home, along with photographs of their hair, almost as if they are tracking their hair growth with the ebb and flow in the growth of this patch of sugarcane.
Browning discusses their art practice as a mode of self-portraiture focusing on their connection to moments in their life that have informed their character as a Southern Black person. Their recent exhibition at the AMA, “Rootwork,” highlighted their work as a mode of exploring the Black Southern landscape, as well as providing glimpses of Black culture and tradition that have become familiar and treasured by many.
Born in Ocala, Fla., Browning received a Bachelor of Science in Photography from the University of Central Florida (2012) and a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from Florida State University (2015). Their work has been shown nationally, and is in the collections of the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Southeast Museum of Photography, and the University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora. Browning is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where they aid their students in creating artwork that speaks to their unique experiences.
