Jordan Derron Brown (b. 1996, Silver Spring, MD) is an artist based in Baltimore, MD. Informed by masquerade storytelling, craft history, and performance, he works across disciplines to investigate the boundary between memory and dream. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
I practice the art of making anew. I reclaim, reconstruct, and rediscover my reality through ritual creation.
Writing, performance, natural science, meditation, and spiritual studies inform my process. I work in the intersection of immaterial and material realities. I entered this work by developing clothing I no longer identified with into quilts, inspired by Gee’s Bend. Familiar objects, such as articles of clothing, are used in daily rituals to tell stories about history, values, relationships, and identities. I exercise the agency to rewrite a story through ritual. The tangible outcomes of this processing–as alchemized objects–become talismans of imagination, care, and grief.
My current work crafts peacekeepers, protectors, and messengers from cloth and found materials. I work with natural color, staining and dyeing techniques, and rhythmic actions such as stitching and weaving to create quiet, organic objects to be meditated with. In the meditative space, portals of rest, dreaming, and memory open to allow communication with guides in other realms. Through sensual intention, the objects bend reality towards slowness and groundedness.
Teaching within my community is an extension of my practice. I facilitate learning experiences for diverse audiences that explore the embodied wisdom contained in craft processes. Drawing from my training in performance, I teach how the slow, repetitive, and meditative qualities of craft develop intuition, regulate the nervous system, and deepen one’s capacity to feel. These skills nurture resilience, foster community care and resist exploitation. This work trains sensitive, attuned craftspeople empowered with the ability to fashion alternate realities.
My practice activates thresholds between interior and exterior, myth and memory, past and future. I cultivate spaces of becoming, where memory and dream converge to generate new possibilities.
CV (Updated June 2025)