Iona Rozeal Brown

Rozeal is a contemporary American artist known for her colourful and complex cross cultural painting technique.

She best known for her narrative canvases commenting on cultural, racial and sexual identity.

A large part of her work touches on the differences between appropriation and appreciation.

Ultimately, Rozeals work and portrayal of pornographic prints illustrates a set of politically powerful messages.

Early Life

Rozeal, born Iona Rozeal Brown, was born in Washington, DC.

in 1966 at the height of the civil rights movement.

This African-American, contemporary artist keeps her family and personal life very private.

As a child, her mother was a junior high math teacher and her father was an academic advisor at the University of the District Columbia.

in Washington D.C.

Education

Rozeal has an extensive education.

Soon after attending Pratt, Rozeal attended the San Francisco Art Institute and the Skowhegan School of painting and Sculpture, during the late 1990s, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts.

The artist continued her education at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

This cultural hybridity reflected Asian black faced women and ultimately explored the 'rebellious' Ganguro style of the 1990s.

This clash of cultures in her artwork exposed Asian appropriation of African American women.

For example, Blackface #19, one of ten works in her collection, depicts a young Japanese woman sitting in a silk Kimono with traditional African Hairstyle.

It is assumed that the young women illustrated in the painting is a Geisha.

Geishas were female performers that wore traditional kimonos and painted their faces white who danced and sang.

Poking out from beneath this traditionally worn Japanese garment are blue jeans, white adidas shoes and a thick gold chain.

These Afro-Asiatic characters explored the impacts of American popular culture on Japanese culture.

Rozeal's work looks at African American culture and how it has touched upon other cultures around the world, specifically Japanese culture.

As a child, Rozeal accounts one of her first interactions with Japanese culture when attending a Kabuki theater performance.

This type of theatrical performance, dating back to the seventeenth century, is known for its elaborate costumes and dramatized production.

Later in her life, while attending school at the San Francisco Art Institute, Rozeal's curiosity with Japanese culture grew with her encounter with the Ganguro.

Ganguro, sometimes referred to as Gyaru, is a fashion style that developed in the mid-1990s.

With this trend, young Japanese women would darken their skin, bleach their hair and wear brightly coloured extravagant outfits.

This plays a large role in her artwork.

She began her education in 1991, attending the University of Maryland for a Bachelor of Sciences in Kinesiological Sciences.

She initially wanted to pursue a career in physiotherapy but her interest drifted.

After graduating, she attended the Montgomery County Community College in 1995, where she took a few classes.

Her artistic career did not begin till her early twenties.

She started her studies at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, New York in 1996.

Rozeal travelled abroad to Japan in 2001.

Here she completed her Master of Fine Arts in 2002.

Early Work

While receiving her master's degree at Yale, Rozeal created her first collection, A3 Black on Both Sides [A3 stands for Afro-Asiatic Allegory].

This work as described by Rozeal is a visual articulation of traditional Ukiyo-e aesthetics mixed with signifiers of hip-hop culture to reflect this multicultural synergy that she was interested in understanding.

Brown expresses mixed feelings about the trend saying that this fetishization of blackness is "pretty weird, and a little offensive" (Genocchio 2004).

With this curiosity and inspiration developing during her undergraduate studies, she was determined to learn and explore the Ganguro phenomenon.