Rendering 4

The article published on the website of the newspaper “The New York Times” on February 22, 2013 is headlined “Single Works With Myriad Influences”

The article reports at length that over the last decade the painter Iona Rozeal Brown has created a fantastical body of work that unites so many seemingly irreconcilable realities — Japanese ukiyo-e prints and hip-hop; voguing and Noh and Kabuki theater; West African adinkra symbols and graffiti; Byzantine religious painting and comic-book motifs — that it gives new meaning to the idealized space of the canvas.

It’s an open secret that On Thursday the first of two concurrent shows of Ms. Brown’s new work will open at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, on West 57th Street in Manhattan, followed by one at Salon 94 Freemans, in Freeman Alley on the Lower East Side. The downtown show, “introducing ... THE HOUSE OF BANDO,” opening March 5, takes up where Ms. Brown’s inaugural foray into stage work, “The Battle of Yestermore,” for Performa in 2011, left off. It features a series of iconlike portraits of the voguing stars Benny and Javier Ninja, who performed in the 2011 piece, a dance battle at the intersection of Asian and African-American culture.

It was revealed that in her large, chaotic studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Ms. Brown talked with Randy Kennedy about her first trip to Japan in 2001 and working in New York. These are excerpts from the conversation.

The article carries a lot of comment on the fact Ms. Brown, 46, was raised in Washington and came to painting only in her late 20s, studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Yale University School of Art. One of her early epiphanies was the discovery of ganguro, a 1990s movement in Japan in which young girls expressed their love of hip-hop culture by darkening their skin and dressing like their favorite stars. This led to a series of early works known as the “blackface paintings” that jump-started her career, one that is now gaining speed with a host of projects in the works.

Analyzing this situation it is necessary to emphasize that in histories of Kabuki they say that if you were to take pictures of the performances, the stills would all look like the figures in woodblock prints. And watching Kabuki, it hit me: The same thing is happening with voguing, the same formality. “Strike a pose” poses.

As for me, I think that it’s a new style in the field of art and it’s a good start for the creator.