R.A..D…I..O.

Roberts Projects is pleased to present R.A..D…I..O., an exhibition by Brenna Youngblood and the artist's second solo presentation with the gallery. Featuring nine new paintings alongside a freestanding sculpture and earlier works in assemblage and photography, R.A..D…I..O. demonstrates the breadth of Youngblood's investigations into the complexities of American material culture. With her unique process of assemblage and painterly abstraction, Youngblood's work remains in dialogue with California's rich history of assemblage and abstract expressionist artists including George Herms, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar. Where Youngblood's work departs from her predecessors' is in the consistent use of and emphasis on objects, images, and languages of contemporary life: materials found at home and on the street, images seen while shopping or scrolling through social media, words or phrases extracted from commercial or utilitarian contexts, and remade via collage. In R.A..D…I..O., Youngblood continues to use typically discarded or overlooked images as anchor points within her mixed-media paintings, which now feature stenciled flower designs that provide a form of sculptural relief. Objects as varied as coat hangers, gloves, and Nilla Wafer boxes are removed from their original contexts and made to function as units of form and color. Once deconstructed, these fragmented objects assume new meaning and significance within the visual fields that Youngblood creates. The deliberately constrained palette which characterized the artist's previous works has been dramatically expanded to include yellows, blues, reds, and blacks in a progression of tonalities that evoke the artificial and handmade in equal measure. Brenna Youngblood (b. 1979 Riverside, CA; based in Los Angeles, CA) has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include the Light and the Dark, Roberts Projects, Culver City, CA (2021); Lavender Rainbow, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA (2020); Abstracted Realities, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2015); Projects Series 50: Brenna Youngblood, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2015); Brenna Youngblood: Loss Prevention, the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2014) and Hammer Projects: Brenna Youngblood, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2006). Group exhibitions include Colliding Vision: Contemporary California Collage, Riverside Art Museum (2023); Art of California: Greater than the Sum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2021); Dust My Broom: Southern Vernacular from the Permanent Collection, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2017); A Shape That Stands Up, Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2016); Africa Forecast: Fashioning Contemporary Life, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA (2016); Murmurs: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2013); Fore, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2012) and Made in L.A. 2012, organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXArt, Los Angeles (2012). In 2015, she was the recipient of the Seattle Art Museum's Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize. Youngblood's works are held in private and public collections, including the Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; the Hammer Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, CA; The Blake Byrne Collection, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles, CA; The Eileen Harris Norton Collection, Santa Monica; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pomona College Museum of Art; JPMorgan Chase Art Collection and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

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