“Obachan” Nurse, COVID-19, 2020

Aya Brown

Image Credit: Aya Brown, “Obachan” Nurse, COVID-19, 2020. Colored pencil on brown kraft paper. 9 x 12 inches (22.6 x 30.48 cm), from Gulf Coast Summer/Fall 2021, Issue 33. 2

About the Artist

Aya Brown

Aya Brown (b. 1995, Brooklyn, NY) documents her lived experience as a Black woman and centers the history of Black lesbian women in an active celebration of all their unyielding magnificence, all their strength, all their softness. Her drawings and paintings on brown surfaces refuse whiteness as a standard and starting point. These works challenge what is seen and unseen, and empower Blackness and queerness in its labor, representation, and visibility by expanding the form and forum they are presented within. Aya’s intimate collaboration with the subjects of her work radically holds space for the sovereign reclamation of each subject’s image and selfhood, and positions Black women as the primary “essential workers” that, with all they do, carry, love, and create, make the world work. Aya’s work has been shown this year by the Brooklyn Public Library; the MTA in collaboration with Artsy and OUTFRONT; and featured in Artsy, Cultured, the New York Times, and Vogue.

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