Rashayla Marie Brown Is Newcity's Artist of the Moment

SAIC alum Rashayla Marie Brown (BFA 2015) is a celebrated multidisciplinary artist and lecturer in the School's Photography department. She was recently featured on the cover of the September issue of Newcity as their "Artist of the Moment" and in the article discussed her artistic journey through photography, performance, film, and writing.

In her interview with Newcity, Brown said that she would soon be traveling to Rabat, Morocco, for a two week period to study Arabic. She had visited previously and said that her return to the city is part of her desire to take her work to the next level by working internationally. Her hope is to incorporate many different languages into her installations and the titles of her works. "And because I work also as a writer in addition to being a person who makes visual objects but also performs at times, words and language and different systems of communication are becoming more and more a primary focus of my work," said Brown. Her current projects include a film she is working on in Atlanta called Reality is Not Good Enough and she plans to finish the film in the spring. With the support of a Franklin Furnace grant she will also be presenting the film version of her ongoing performance project Rage to Master in New York. “I feel that my work doesn’t only deal with race and it doesn’t only deal with sexuality. It deals with a kind of despair of what happens in historical omissions and what happens to people as individuals when they’re dealing with these large, looming social conditions,” said Brown. The first in her series of small essays called "Staircase Thoughts" for the On Civil Disobedience series is forthcoming with Green Lantern Press. Read the full write-up here.