justin tyler bryant

Born in Stuttgart AR., Justin Bryant received his BFA in Studio Art from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2012 and his MFA in Studio Art from Louisiana State University in 2018 and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (’17).

Justin’s recent work investigates the past and present imagery of African-Americans to reflect a multi- contextual narrative of poetry, personal narrative, and history. In his work, he uses found objects, painting, drawing, and video to suggest a fugitive notion of blackness. He looks to call-and-response, poetry, and various forms of communication as a protective sensibility. He recontextualizes familiar media such as drawings, paintings, prints, performance, and video. These acts find themselves, as theorist Brent Hayes Edwards puts it (referring to African diasporic poetics), “unmade and redone at every turn.” He’s interested in these “unmade and redone” components as an evolving potentiality that suspends notions of Blackness into a space that does not fetishize critique. Rather, the existence of the work posits the understanding of Blackness as something that is not always revealed on the surface of things.

Justin is a full-time instructor at Philander Smith University and a 2019 Interchange Artist Fellow for the Mid America Arts Alliance.