Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour

Based in Metro Detroit, Akea Brionne (b. 1996) is an interdisciplinary research-driven artist working at the intersection of lens and fiber-based media. Her practice explores the relationship between colonial and imperialist histories and their reverberations into cultural storytelling, identity politics, and assimilation. Through observations focusing on the African Diaspora with a particular interest in Afro Creole culture, Brionne utilizes emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and digital weaving to translate surreal compositions into multidimensional tapestries adorned with glitter, oil pastels, and rhinestones.   

Situated in the North Gallery, Brionne will display a new body of large multipaneled works depicting Afrosurreal worlds, built from personal and archival reference points, posing themes of awareness, perception, and spiritual and embodied knowledge. Centered on a mythical forest as a site of refuge, Brionne invites visitors to rest and commune. Foregrounding Brionne’s background in photography, these compositions also repeat and reframe the compositional modes of the panorama, portrait, and landscape to new ends.  

Brionne is a 2023 graduate of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and the fourth installment of Cranbrook Art Museum’s Fresh Paint series, which highlights recent work from Detroit-area contemporary artists.