Bay Sick: New Mythologies From Black Speculative World Building

Artist and storyteller Nyame Brown makes paintings that reside somewhere between the mythological, fantastical, and futuristic. Remixing experience, folklore, and popular-culture, Brown’s narrative paintings depict new characters and stories to describe and conjure the past, present, and future of African Americans in the Bay Area.

Storytelling runs in Brown’s family: his grandmother and father often told him stories that sidled up comfortably with the fantastical. His works carry on this tradition of storytelling, while taking agency to tell new stories, responding to new needs and contemporary circumstance.

"There is a need to see new stories, ones that have an African nucleus, but spinning them away and re-mixing some of the symbols away, almost like the African root is there, but it’s not the first thing, you know? And after you peel the layers back, you then go, “Oh, man, the root is African.” - Nyame Brown