Three Pearl Strands: Banana Skirt Series
Artist
LaKela Brown
(American, born 1982)
Date2024
MediumPlaster
Dimensions29 × 21 1/2 × 8 1/2 in. (73.7 × 54.6 × 21.6 cm)
ClassificationsSculpture
Credit LinePurchase, Richard J. Biliatis Fund, 2024
Object numberUAC7825
Description LaKela Brown is a contemporary sculpture artist whose work grapples with themes of community, identity, nourishment, and signification. In so doing, her work addresses (and redresses) art historical canon; through her unpainted plaster casts, she reevaluates media and subject to decidedly center imagery culled from Black American life. Common motifs that crop up throughout her oeuvre speak to the food, fashion, and popular culture that characterized her youth—door-knocker earrings, rope chain necklaces, Nefertiti pendants, collard greens, okra, corn, and chicken heads, to name a few.Born in 1982 and raised in West Detroit, Brown graduated from the College for Creative Studies with her BFA in 2005. She has since achieved great acclaim, operating out of Brooklyn, New York where she has featured extensively in group shows and exhibited solo. Most recently, Brown was hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) for the 2024 show From Scratch: Seeding Adornment, which explored “the interconnected threads of ethnobotany, fashion, cultural adornment, and historical consciousness.”
Three Pearl Strands: Banana Skirt Series exemplifies this cross section by paying tribute to the famed performer Josephine Baker, whose public persona and sartorial politics shaped the image of late Parisian modernity. The work—historically, symbolically, and culturally layered through its reference to Baker’s iconic outfit from her 1926 performance in La Folie du Jour—is austere in its unpainted, plaster-white appearance. Compositionally, three lengthy strands of pearls drape behind 26 bananas, which protrude shelf-like from the lower half, offering both an intriguing frontal illusion and compelling three-dimensionality. While the banana forms appear to melt into the white background, the bananas are simultaneously “in your face” and perhaps project a hybridized gendering. By comparison, the spherical pearls lay delicately on the surface in full form while seemingly supported by the arc of the bananas below. The stark whiteness of the piece invokes race, since this outfit was originally on Josphine Baker’s Black American body. The pearls also suggest wealth. Taken together, Three Pearl Strands thus manages to explore gender, race, social class, and even notions of longevity and durability by contrasting gemstones and fruit; this seems a fitting homage to Josephine Baker who lived those tensions. Brown’s reference comes full circle when she explains that Baker “entered my work through a photograph of her tending to her collard greens in her Parisian garden. [Three Pearl Strands: Banana Skirt Series] became a bridge between my adornment and ethnobotany series.”
By Sarah Teppen
1. https://mocadetroit.org/lakela-brown-from-scratch/
2. https://www.instagram.com/p/DAtqFsRxuPY/?img_index=1
