Jordan Brown (b. 1996, Silver Spring, MD) is an artist working with objects and performance. Influenced by studies in dance, music, and traditional crafts, he creates collaged works that function as windows into alternative, liberated futures. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

My practice explores the ways bodies create, challenge, and inhabit space. I am interested in the materiality of the body as a container of memory, and I extend this logic to objects, physical materials, virtual spaces, and technical processes as similar containers. I primarily work in sculpture and performance as modes of inquiry. My practice consists of combining and recombining found elements into hypothetical, abstract studies that perform the body as a multiple, fluid space.

My current practice is informed by my studies in dance, choreography, and writing, as well as craft technologies from the Black American south. Having first worked primarily in performance, I am interested in the multilayered, multitextured nature of identity as informed by one’s environment and community. My work explores a concept of “embodied collage”, in which material and memory recombine in the physical, psychic, and conceptual space of the body. I primarily work with found, used, and donated materials to reconstruct this space through improvisation. My work includes assemblage sculpture, 2D and 3D textile works, performances and performance objects, video, and installations. Through video, I explore the body’s relationship to virtual space, collaging social media, archival footage, and other digital debris into abstract narratives. In all of my work, I evolve a theory of embodiment that creates non-hierarchal relationships between bodies, spaces, and materials. I create works that simultaneously inhabit and embody the space they are in. Together, my works represent a community that values fluidity, liberation, and transformation.

Thematically, I am interested in tensions between opacity and disclosure, similarity and difference, and strength and vulnerability. I engage my practice as an intimate procedure that balances these elements, rooted in intuitive improvisation and play. Improvisation is a method that allows the work to embrace non-definition and multiple perspectives, and remain in a constant, non-linear state of becoming.

Ultimately, I ask: how do we experience selves that do not yet fully exist? Or, to tip it another way, how can we actively create who we are?

CV (Updated June 2025)

To inquire about available artworks, send a message to info@jordanderronbrown.com.