Artist's Bio

Michaela Pilar Brown 

            While Columbia, S.C., painter, collagist, installation and performance artist, photographer and filmmaker Michaela Pilar Brown (b. 1970, Bangor, Maine) works in many media, her art addresses across those media similar issues, typically related to the black body. She uses nontraditional materials and their juxtaposition to each other and/or dissimilar objects to make statements about the body and its relationship to larger cultural themesof age, gender, race, sexuality, history and violence. In doing so, Brown considers memory, myth, ritual, desire and the spaces the body occupies within these vignettes. The narratives move between past, present and surreal projections of the future, sometimes occupying these spaces simultaneously. Brown uses racially identified signifiers to twist and turn mythologies about the body and the spaces it occupies. The environments she creates are disruptive, yet elegant.

In the past decade, Brown has shown in dozens of exhibitions along the East Coast and California. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Carrick Contemporary Art in Durham, N.C.; Tapp’s Art Center and the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C.; Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C.; South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C.; Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C.; and the Sumter County Gallery of Art in Sumter, S.C. Her performances include those at 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, S.C.; the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, N.C.; and in March 2016 at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga. Brown recently was included in group shows such as Remix, currently at the Columbia (S.C.) Museum of Art; Wet Hot Southern Summer at The Southern Gallery in Charleston, S.C.;and the 701 CCA South Carolina Biennial 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019 at 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia. She was an artist in residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, has done considerable curatorial work and studied sculpture and art history at Howard University in Washington, D.C.