Brenna Youngblood: Project Series 50

Text by Naima J. Keith, Rebecca McGrew. Project Series 50: Brenna Youngblood documents the artist’s solo exhibition at Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California (January 20 - May 17, 2015.) Curated by Rebecca McGrew, this exhibition highlights a new suite of paintings consisting of lyrically distressed six-foot-by-five-foot paintings that retain subtle collaged elements. The eight paintings on view explore gestural abstraction, color field painting, and collage, and pose questions about memory, identity, and class. The exhibition is the 50th in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, which presents Southern California artists in focused exhibitions. By combining materials such as canvas, found papers, panel, faux wood, acrylic paint or other detritus from her studio with fragmented photographs of solitary everyday objects, Youngblood creates layered, expressionist, heavily-worked surfaces with both an elegiac and abject quality in their delicately worn roughness. Y