Brownin’
Curated by InLiquid in collaboration with Zindzi Harley, Brownin’ showcases five Philadelphia-based artists whose work studies the Black figure and celebrates black identity by redefining the meaning of beauty.
“Beauty is often framed as subjective, yet Black beauty has historically been interpreted, mediated, and validated through external gazes. Brownin’ re-centers Black aesthetic production within its own cultural context, foregrounding artists who articulate beauty on their own terms. The exhibition brings together five visual artists whose practices engage Blackness not as a monolith, but as a site of plurality, nuance, and self-definition. Rooted in the visual languages and lived realities of Black communities, Brownin’ examines how Black beauty is constructed, performed, and reimagined across the everyday and the symbolic. Featuring emerging and established Philadelphia-based artists, the exhibition resists singular narratives of Black identity, instead presenting a spectrum of aesthetic positions that challenge reduction, stereotype, and commodification. Collectively, these works affirm Black beauty as expansive, evolving, and authored from within. The title Brownin’, drawn from Caribbean slang, reflects the curator’s West Indian heritage and her multicultural upbringing as an African American woman in the South, where she encountered the multiplicity of Black beauty through a familial lens. This perspective informs the curator’s vision and frames the exhibition’s engagement with Black beauty as both a response to and a medium of art and culture emerging from communal memory, bodily agency, activism, and identity affirmation.”
– Zindzi Harley
