iona rozeal brown is the 2007 Richard C. Diebenkorn Fellow. Born in 1966 in Washington, DC, brown took a BS in Kinesiological Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1991. She studied at the Pratt Institute before coming to SFAI to pursue a BFA in painting, which she earned in 1999. brown was the valedictorian of her class at SFAI and the recipient of an SFAI-conferred summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. After SFAI, she took an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2002.

In her work as a painter (she is also an accomplished DJ), brown takes what has become a commonplace motif in contemporary art and cultureÑthe representation of race and genderÑand transmutes it into a richly articulated, synchronic study of the global appropriation and fetishization of African American culture, in particular, hip-hop. In an ongoing series of works and exhibitions that were first elicited, conceptually, by an article she read in 1997, brown deploys and then revisits a theme of her own devising called a3 or Afro-Asiatic allegory. The article in question, The Yellow Negro by Joe Wood, addresses a fad then on the rise in Japan: youths who practice a contemporary version of blackface or ganguro. Equal parts intrigued and disturbed by the phenomenon, brown eventually made her way to Japan in 2001 to explore it firsthand as well as to research Japanese woodblock prints from the Edo period (1603-1868).

Her creative resolve to bring these disparate-seeming fascinations together is what issued in a3, the method whereby she resituates, in her own words, "[hip-hop] codes, honorifics, passages, accoutrements, style-flossing, whips, bling, rhymes, beats, cutting, scratching, fresh gear, dope ropes, b-boy stances, and sampling" within the context of late-seventeenth-century Japanese representational forms and techniques. Turning the imitators' imitations on their heads by generating an array of pastiches, Brown complements what is, on the face of it, socio-political critique with an inventive audit of an aesthetic preoccupation that goes back at least as far as Aristotle: the pre- and post-Modernist/formalist mimetic burden, the supposition that painting imitate nature, life, orÑas it turns outÑantecedent imitations.

brown has been part of a number of important group exhibitions, including the Okwui Enwezor-curated Work Zones: Three Decades of Contemporary Art from SFAI at the Walter and McBean Galleries (SFAI campus) in San Francisco (2006). Her solo exhibitions include Blending Lines at G Fine Art in Washington, DC (2006-2007); a3 the Revolution: Televised, Terrorized, Sexualized at Caren Golden Fine Art in New York (2004); iona rozeal brown at Sandroni Rey Gallery in Los Angeles (2004); and Bling Blasian Bling at the Luggage Store in San Francisco (2004). She also has an upcoming exhibition at Sandroni Rey Gallery in Los Angeles.