Krystle Brown

Artist Statement

My work explores the connections between economic class, ancestry, place, environment, and labor. Combining these themes, I create paintings, video installations, and photographs that explore the inherent power dynamics in these topics. The work I create is deeply personal while simultaneously universal. Through my parents’ sudden deaths, I make work incorporating their financial documents and personal ephemera. I research familial narratives that cross oceans, unwinding ancestral identities that often conflict with one another, and the generational trauma of both colonizer and colonized. 

After my parents died in 2017, I was left with their belongings. My installations incorporate their debt collection records, old clothing, and other objects that inform my ongoing photography work of documenting my maternal ancestor’s homes and lands. My mother’s debt collection records and subsequent court summons received after her death haunt her grave like a ghost, so I collect them and nail them to a wall with unused linen napkins. 

My father’s work shirts represent the physical labor he endured working in Flood Control, shirts now included in video installations and sculptures. His clothes carry the smell of diesel and cigarettes, like the whole world could light on fire. His work, now understood against the backdrop of the climate crisis, has new meaning for me and how I understand my history. 

Then I look out at the house they lived in, that I lived in. It was dirty and nearly uninhabitable. We were always one bad day away from losing it. From here, I photograph and paint spaces and neighborhoods in flux; buildings being torn down, an old Victorian house transforming into a condo, my neighborhood rapidly gentrifying and pricing out the working class. I see elements of my home and my history everywhere.  

By taking from my family’s lived experiences and what I have realized about my home, my neighborhood, my city, and my country, I am left with uncomfortable observations about the human condition. 

Hauntology describes a future that cannot arrive, caught in a time loop of warped nostalgia. My work sits at the confluence of remembering/reliving pasts while enduring the hope and pain for better futures.

Artist Bio

Krystle Brown (b.1989, she/her/they/them) is a multimedia artist based in Boston, MA, who explores the connections between family history, placemaking, class, and power structures. They hold a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Painting and Art History and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. While studying at SMFA at Tufts, Brown was awarded the Montague Travel grant to research in Northern Ireland and was awarded the Katherine Romero Graduating Student Award. In addition, Brown has received other grants and awards such as The Boston Opportunity Fund in 2021 and Best in Show-Silver Key at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition in 2020. Brown has curated several exhibitions, including co-curating the Webster Court Project in Newton, MA. She has been an artist-in-residence at Lazuli Residency in Corinth, VT, 77 Art in Rutland, VT, and Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. In 2019 they started the Emerging Artist Fellowship at Kingston Gallery in Boston and exhibited their first solo exhibition, 15,000 Days in March of 2021 as a part of their tenure.

Work available on Artsy