Brenna Youngblood (b. Riverside, CA; based in Los Angeles, CA) is often classified as an assemblage artist among the ranks of Noah Purifoy, George Herms, John Outterbridge and Betye Saar, though Youngblood’s practice resists any singular categorization. While drawing from the history of assemblage, she embraces the act of collecting society’s discarded fragments, transforming them into layered, highly charged reflections on culture, history, and identity.
Originally trained as a photographer, Brenna Youngblood borrows photomontage and collage techniques to build the surfaces of her paintings to address the aesthetics and politics of abstraction. Additionally, Youngblood acknowledges the tradition of assemblage in her use of these objects “to make something new out of something old”. Later pieces demonstrate her approach to abstraction, retaining a slight nod to reality through painterly, gestural compositions grounded by architectural and social cues, which she refers to as “landscapes”. Her work examines political subjects and social issues as she explores Black American identity and representation, referencing historical moments in Black history.
Youngblood received her BFA from California State University, Long Beach in 2002 and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006, where she studied with artists John Baldessari, Catherine Opie and James Welling. Recent group exhibitions include Space is the Place: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2026); As if in a Dream: History, Fantasy, and Future, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA (2026); Donated With Love, Albertina Klosterneuburg, Klosterneuburg, Austria (2026); The Black Interior: Imagining Home, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2025); and Baker’s Dozen, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2025). Recent solo exhibitions include R.A..D…I..O., Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2025), and the LIGHT and the DARK, Roberts Projects, Culver City, CA (2021). Solo institutional exhibitions include Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA (2020); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2015); Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2015); the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2014); and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2006). In 2015, she was the recipient of the Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight/Jacob Lawrence Prize.
Youngblood’s works are held in public and private collections, including The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Art, Design, and Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA; Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Amherst, MA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the U.S. Embassy, Maputo, Mozambique, among others.
Brenna Youngblood
SUNSET, 2025
Mixed media on canvas
60 x 48 in (152.4 x 121.9 cm)
Brenna Youngblood
OUT THE BLUE (figure), 2025
Mixed media on canvas
60 x 48 in (152.4 x 121.9 cm)
Brenna Youngblood
No More Drama, 2021
Mixed media on canvas
72 x 59.75 x 6.5 in (182.9 x 151.8 x 16.5 cm)
Brenna Youngblood
INCARCERATION, 2020
Mixed media on canvas
69.75 x 40 in (152.4 x 101.6 cm)
Brenna Youngblood
Master P, 2012
Mixed media on panel
64 x 39.5 in (162.6 x 100.3 cm)
Brenna Youngblood
Democratic Dollar, 2015
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
72.25 x 60 in (183.5 x 152.4 cm)
Brenna Youngblood
3 dollar bill (dirty Money), 2013
Mixed media on canvas
72.25 x 60.187 in (183.51 x 152.8 cm)
Collection of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Brenna Youngblood
X, 2012
Tree
78.5 x 47.875 x 5 in (199.4 x 121.6 x 12.7 cm)
Brenna Youngblood
Time Waits For No One, 2017
Mixed media on panel
80.125 x 70.125 x 1.625 in (203.517 x 178.117 x 4.127 cm)
Brenna Youngblood: Abstracted Realities
Seattle Art Museum
November 13, 2015 – April 17, 2016
Artist Brenna Youngblood is Seattle Art Musuems’s 2015 Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize Winner, and her exhibition Abstracted Realities is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through April 17, 2016. The Gwendolyn Knight | Jacob Lawrence Prize is awarded bi-annually to an early career black artist—an individual who has been producing mature work for less than 10 years.
SPACE IS THE PLACE is a Hammer Contemporary Collection exhibition that takes its title from the 1973 studio album and 1974 film by Sun Ra (1914–1993), a Black American experimental jazz composer and musician known for his radical and esoteric views on Black liberation. The selected works in the exhibition consider “space” as a conceptual framework, through the themes of afro-futurism, belonging, placemaking, and the act of taking up space. SPACE IS THE PLACE comprises installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and multi-media works by nearly thirty artists.
These artworks started from a kernel of reality, glimmer of lived experience, or sliver of memory. Like dreams, they combine real and familiar elements but in illogical or uncanny ways. With works from the Museum’s collection supplemented by loans, this exhibition shows artists giving fleeting memories durable form, envisioning a future, and transforming the everyday into the visionary. Spread across the McCormick, Wasserman Family, and Davidson Galleries, and predominantly featuring collection items with a few special loans, the presentation is divided into two sections: landscapes and bodies (mostly human).
Drawing its title from poet Elizabeth Alexander’s book of the same name, The Black Interior considers the practices of artists who explore the domestic space as creative inspiration and refuge for one’s inner world. The works on view, all from CAAM’s permanent collection, reflect on the objects and memories of home. The shower, the closet, the phone, a photo album, a doily, a handkerchief, masking tape, and a magazine all become expressive materials or generative subjects. Everyday routines and domestic traditions are sources for artistic decisions. From craft and collage to sculpture and video, the works in The Black Interior prompt us to see the imaginative possibilities in our home lives.
By Irina Gusin
Across each painting in “R.A..D…I..O.,” Brenna Youngblood’s latest exhibition at Roberts Projects, the artist laid out a dialogue between painting as either a stage or a window— a discourse between flatness and depth. Youngblood’s midsize chromatic paintings blazed against the soaring white walls of the gallery, but to appreciate each work’s inherent complexity required close viewing.
Illuminating concepts of identity, race, gender, and memory, Colliding Visions: Contemporary California Collage features 25 works by five Southern California artists – Chelle Barbour, Genevieve Gaignard, Patricia Jessup-Woodlin, Betye Saar, and Brenna Youngblood – whose unique viewpoints have been assembled as a visual conversation between the museum walls.
Crenshaw is a neighborhood in transition. Construction of a light rail line connecting Crenshaw and LAX airport and the opening of SoFi Stadium in nearby Inglewood have boosted home values and brought in new businesses, while accelerating gentrification and displacement. Destination Crenshaw was incorporated as a non-profit in November 2017 to draw attention to the area’s Black history and culture.
The Museum of Contemporary Art and Vans have collaborated on a collection of footwear and apparel that celebrates creativity with California roots. LA-based artist Brenna Youngblood distills an alternative Americana as seen through a dry art historical lens, often integrated found objects and materials into her compositions, imbuing her work with a sensual, tactile quality. The Vans x MOCA Classic Slip-On highlights her unique vision with an allover print inspired by her art.
The City of Los Angeles’s Cultural Affairs Commission has approved plans for the initial stage of Destination Crenshaw, the $100 million public art and environmental revitalization project that aims to turn a 1.3-mile-long stretch of South Los Angeles into a hub for Black arts and culture. Kehinde Wiley and Brenna Youngblood are two of the artists commissioned for the project.
Destination Crenshaw, the 1.3-mile public art corridor on Crenshaw Boulevard with a lineup of top names including Kehinde Wiley and Alison Saar, had kept its works of art tightly under wraps while awaiting a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission vote. On Wednesday, the commission greenlighted plans for all seven permanent installations scheduled to debut in the first phase of the project in fall 2022. Fundraising for the $100 million Destination Crenshaw — which now stands at $61.5 million — is getting a boost from DeMar DeRozan, a Chicago Bulls player, who will lead a new private fundraising drive, organizers said.
Roberts Projects is thrilled to announce representation of Los Angeles-based artist Brenna Youngblood. In assemblage, multimedia collage, painting, sculpture and installation, Brenna Youngblood takes as her subject the distilling and revising of an alternative Americana as seen through a dry art historical lens. Her work incorporates both autobiographical and fictional narratives to explore the iconography of the Black experience, the methods, politics and ethics of representation, and the legacy of abstraction.
By Carrie Dedon
Brenna Youngblood’s abstract paintings are invariably more layered—literally and figuratively—than first meets the eye. Originally trained as a photographer, Youngblood works with an extensive personal archive of photographs and objects that she collages onto the surfaces of her densely painted canvases. In a 2013 interview she discussed the importance of this textured surface, and the integration of everyday objects into it.
Edited by Antwaun Sargent, the publication accompanies the traveling exhibition, surveys the work of a new generation of Black artists, and features the voices of a diverse group of curators who are on the cutting edge of contemporary art.
The Riverside Art Museum (RAM) proudly presents Brenna Youngblood: Lavender Rainbow, running February 1–March 29, 2020.
Brenna Youngblood’s work explores issues of African American identity and representation and often references historically significant moments and organizations in African American history, such as her 2017 sculpture M.I.A. that “refers to the Montgomery Improvement Association, a group co-organized by Martin Luther King, Jr., to guide the Montgomery bus boycott protest in 1955.”
Beginning in spring 2019, MOCA will dedicate its downtown locations to multiple exhibitions celebrating the museum’s 40th anniversary and its permanent collection. Each location will feature special exhibitions highlighting different themes and stories found within the institution’s permanent collection of more than 7,000 objects. As part of this celebration, MOCA will debut a new ongoing series of exhibitions titled Open House.
By Rosanna Albertini and Peter Kirby
Inescapable romance, and inescapable choice of dreams through a personal time of vibrations inside the artist sharing stories all around her since she was born in the high desert, slowly adjusting to different urban places, at times captured by details, walls, doors, shoes, art made by other artists…maybe the revolving movement inside a washing machine gives the idea.
By Irina Gusin
Across each painting in “R.A..D…I..O.,” Brenna Youngblood’s latest exhibition at Roberts Projects, the artist laid out a dialogue between painting as either a stage or a window— a discourse between flatness and depth. Youngblood’s midsize chromatic paintings blazed against the soaring white walls of the gallery, but to appreciate each work’s inherent complexity required close viewing. The artist cleverly, and oftentimes humorously, employed an arsenal of tools and media that included layering, collage, drips, splatters, plastic molds, and photographic material, creating dense, enigmatic assemblages that served to expand and contract the depth of the pictorial space, both literally and metaphorically.
By Shelley Holcomb
One of the most striking throughlines in Brenna Youngblood’s practice is how she makes memory and material inseparable. Her work moves with both precision and abandonment, often built from fragments — objects once overlooked or discarded, images found or personal, materials that are humble yet heavy with resonance. Brenna has always had a way of distilling the visual noise of American life into something that hums, aches, or pulsates with clarity.
By Laila Reshad
Our entire understanding of the world is built on associations—we see and believe in symbols and iconography, objects that represent a memory, a season, a person we once were. We base our past, and slowly, our entire lives on what we’re able to recall.
Los Angeles-based artist Brenna Youngblood has made an artistic identity out of breaking these associations, taking objects and images of everyday contemporary experience and shifting their meaning onto her canvas.
By Stephanie Wong
Why It’s Worth a Look: In “R.A..D…I..O.,” Brenna Youngblood breaks down American material culture and rebuilds it from the scraps. Mass-market kitsch, street detritus, and found photos collide in vibrant, mixed-media paintings that splice abstraction with consumer critique.
Know Before You Go: More than paintings, these works are rewired signals from a culture overloaded with constant noise. Rooted in LA and inspired by the West Coast's storied lineage of radical assemblage, Youngblood brings a sharp, contemporary edge to Californian expressionism.
R.A..D...I..O. at Roberts Projects is featured on Artforum.com’s “Must-See Shows” list—an editors' selection of essential exhibitions worldwide. This exhibtion features nine new paintings alongside earlier works in assemblage and photography, R.A..D…I..O. demonstrates the breadth of Youngblood’s investigations into the complexities of American material culture. By incorporating mass-produced kitsch and objects of everyday use into her compositions, Youngblood reveals how specific registers of visual communication can be disrupted and broken down before being reconstituted into something altogether new.
Roberts Projects is showing a new site-specific installation by Betye Saar that reinterprets her 1983 city-commissioned mural L.A. Energy, which the 95-year-old artist will be creating in person, on-site. "We're not worried about walk-in sales, more about having the best booth," said gallery co-owner Bennett Roberts, who is also showing works by Amoako Boafo, Brenna Youngblood, and Kehinde Wiley.
Roberts Projects will bring together generations of artists from the city of Los Angeles. Kehinde Wiley, who is currently on show at LA’s Huntington Museum, presents new painting, alongside Betye Saar, renowned for her contribution to Black Arts Movement in the 1970s.
In assemblage, multimedia collage, painting, sculpture and installation, LA-based artist Brenna Youngblood takes as her subject the distilling and revising of an alternative Americana as seen through a dry art historical lens. Her work incorporates both autobiographical and fictional narratives to explore the iconography of the African American experience, the methods, politics and ethics of representation, and the legacy of abstraction. Youngblood often integrates found objects and materials into her compositions, imbuing her work with a sensual, tactile quality. The Vans x MOCA Classic Slip-On highlights her unique vision with an allover print inspired by her art.
A slice of life, words of Brenna. They include the fact that each art piece is also cut off and detached from a bundle of experiences that everyone carries and burns, to feed the mysterious envelope of their body inside and around. The living life.Do paintings have it? No doubt yes. If the artist gave it to them. For how long it is hard to tell.
A black and white sweater, a hoarder’s worth of buttons, slip-on shoes, a brittle “No Parking” sign. These found materials interrupt the abstracted surfaces of Brenna Youngblood’s paintings in ways that would probably make Piet Mondrian yelp. Mondrian believed abstraction could only tap into the universal harmonies of life if it shunned the crudeness of reality in favor of simplified forms. His view, utopic and myopic at the same time, left its mark on 20th-century styles and movements, from Color Field painting to Minimalism.
the LIGHT and the DARK takes as its genesis Youngblood’s experience navigating the difficulties of last year and applying her lived experiences – endured as two separate but simultaneous realities – to her practice.
By Eve Wood
How we balance our individual experiences within the larger scope of our lives in many ways determines who we are, and how we understand and relate to the world around us. Reflecting on the dense and often traumatic events of the past year, which included a global pandemic and a re-awakening to racial injustice, Brenna Youngblood, in her inaugural exhibition at Roberts Projects, mediates her personal associations to these very public events as all of the works in the exhibition comprise a space for both reflection and determined response.
Currently on view in Los Angeles: five galleries are presenting solo exhibitions of highly regarded African American artists working in a variety of mediums and styles, including portraiture, abstraction, and sculpture. The presentations include the first West Coast exhibition of Amy Sherald, Stanley Whitney’s first full-scale exhibition in Los Angeles, and Brenna Youngblood’s first solo show with Roberts Projects since joining the gallery earlier this year.
Brenna Youngblood mines historical movements like assemblage and Color Field painting, fusing it with her lived experience that lends her abstractions a deeply personal quality. Her first exhibition at Culver City’s Roberts Projects, the LIGHT and the DARK, is informed by her experience of two of the most seismic events of the last year: the global pandemic and the struggle for racial equity and equality. Incorporating everyday objects like buttons or a sweater, with a range of painterly effects, Youngblood’s works straddle the line between painting and sculpture, universal and specific.
Los Angeles-based artist Brenna Youngblood, known for her semi-abstract assemblages, has joined the roster at Roberts Projects in LA. Her debut solo exhibition will be on view from March 6 to April 17.
Los Angeles’s Roberts Projects gallery now represents Brenna Youngblood, whose work in multiple mediums focuses on the relationship between life and art. Her work, which often takes the form of photo-based canvases and assemblages, pays homage to a host of art-historical sources, from Jasper Johns to Noah Purifoy, and alludes to Black history. Her first exhibition with the gallery will be held in March.
By Christopher Knight
Brenna Youngblood gets the “conceptual feedback” going in a painting in which an orderly grid of squares has morphed into beat-up chain-link fencing, the fractured acrylic lines of color apparently squeezed straight from the tube. The image forms a battered physical screen, through which fragments of metallic color — green, crimson, silver — flicker beneath a field of mottled gray.
By Lisa Jaye Young
When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, how much will your art collection be worth? In 1989, almost thirty years ago, the Guerilla Girls posed this now infamous question to the art world. In a perfect world, one that we clearly do not yet enjoy, it would be great to think that the “Magnetic Fields” exhibition of modern and contemporary abstraction by women of color marks this moment. The ideal moment when racism and sexism are so unfashionable that they play no role.
By Erin Langer
When I walked into Brenna Youngblood’s abstracted realities, at the Seattle Art Museum, I thought this would be a show about its painted subjects. The eight works’ contents—an oversized “x”, a confetti of dollar-bill signs, a dripping map, a Chuck Taylor sole atop a pyramid—held so much depth on their own. Knowing her also to be an artist whose practice extends to mediums rooted in physical objects, including sculpture, collage, assemblage, and photography, objects at first seemed to be the heart of the matters here.
By Jennifer S. Li
Rising young artist Brenna Youngblood's latest exhibition consisted of 10 mixed-media paintings and a found-objects installation (all 2013). The show, titled Activation-an aggregate of "active" and "vision," as well as a nod to the video gamer publisher of the same name-sent the viewer down a ribbit hole filled with visual puzzles and allustions. The complicated yet seemingly effortless works (most of which are at least six feet to a side_ mimic everyday textures and objects and call to mind Jasper John's adage: "A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator."
