Brenna Youngblood R.A..D...I..O.
Roberts Projects is pleased to present R.A..D…I..O., an exhibition by Brenna Youngblood and the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery. Featuring nine new paintings alongside a freestanding sculpture and 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.
With her unique process of assemblage and painterly abstraction, Youngblood’s work remains in dialogue with California’s rich history of assemblage and abstract expressionist artists including George Herms, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar. Where Youngblood’s work departs from her predecessors’ is in the consistent use of and emphasis on objects, images and languages of contemporary life: materials found at home and on the street, images seen while shopping or scrolling through social media, words or phrases extracted from commercial or utilitarian contexts and remade via collage. The attention to the ready-made in these works—along with Youngblood’s longstanding use of photography and found images—are critically important elements that combine contemporary references, abstract forms and novel beauty.
In R.A..D…I..O., Youngblood continues to use typically discarded or overlooked images as anchor points within her mixed-media paintings, which now feature stenciled flower designs that provide a form of sculptural relief. Objects as varied as coat hangers, gloves and Nilla Wafer boxes are removed from their original contexts and made to function as units of form and color. Once deconstructed, these fragmented objects assume new meaning and significance within the visual fields that Youngblood creates. The deliberately constrained palette which characterized the artist’s previous works has been dramatically expanded to include yellows, blues, reds and blacks in a progression of tonalities that evoke the artificial and hand-made in equal measure.
While her compositions and techniques of abstraction have grown more complex, Youngblood’s connection to the photographic image remains an important visual and conceptual reference. This is reinforced by the use of photographic imagery in the nine new works—including images created by Youngblood herself or ones she sources from the flow of digital imagery found online. Though we might try to recapture the original meaning of images in Youngblood’s paintings, the artist’s altering or fracturing of their forms makes such an attempt altogether impossible. Instead, she reveals the malleability not only of the materials and images around us, but ultimately of language and meaning as well.
Brenna Youngblood (b. 1979 Riverside, CA; based in Los Angeles, CA) is known for creating multi-faceted works that exist at the intersection between abstract painting, assemblage and photography and which explore the layered meanings of American material culture. Though often classified strictly as an assemblage artist within the lineage of fellow Californian artists like George Herms, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar, Youngblood’s practice ultimately defies easy categorization.
Originally trained as a photographer, Youngblood combines a sensitivity to the world of ready-made images with an interest in the fragments of discarded objects that surround us. The multi-layered and densely textured paintings she creates, which she refers to as “landscapes,” acknowledge the tradition of assemblage without being confined by it. Instead, Youngblood uses these everyday materials to, as she has said, “make something new out of something old,” while also creating highly charged and multi-layered critiques of contemporary consumer culture. Her work also regularly deals with political subjects and social issues as she explores Black American identity and representation while referencing historical moments in Black history.
Youngblood’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include R.A..D...I..O., Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2025); the LIGHT and the DARK, Roberts Projects, Culver City, CA (2021); Lavender Rainbow, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA (2020); Abstracted Realities, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle (2015); Projects Series 50: Brenna Youngblood, Pomona College Museum of Art, Pomona, CA (2015); Brenna Youngblood: Loss Prevention, the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2014) and Hammer Projects: Brenna Youngblood, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, (2006). Group exhibitions include Colliding Vision: Contemporary California Collage, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA (2023); Art of California: Greater than the Sum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2021); Dust My Broom: Southern Vernacular from the Permanent Collection, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2017); A Shape That Stands Up, Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2016); AFRICA FORECAST: Fashioning Contemporary Life, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta (2016); Murmurs: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2013); Fore, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012) and Made in L.A. 2012, Organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART, Los Angeles (2012). In 2015, she was the recipient of the Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize.
Youngblood’s works are held in private and public collections, including the Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, CA; The Blake Byrne Collection, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles, CA; The Eileen Harris Norton Collection, Santa Monica, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.