Artist: Marcus Brutus
Title: The Uhmericans
Medium: Archival Pigment Print
Size: 22 x 22 Inches (55.9 x 1.3 cm)
Edition: 40 + 3AP
Year: 2020
Notes: Hand signed and numbered by the Artist. Artwork is in excellent condition and comes custom framed.
The Uhmericans underscore Brutus’s examination of black American identity and contemporary civil rights struggles through figuration. This piece depicts two sitting figures, wearing the jerseys of athletes that have staged protests. The title is also a play on Robert Frank's The Americans, however, Brutus depicts the American experience from an opposing perspective.
Marcus Brutus’s paintings explore, in the artist’s words, “ideas of power through portraiture.” Brutus' work considers "the power of a black subject to define their own culture, standards of beauty, heroes, and identity.”
Brutus, a New York-based, self-taught artist, previously worked in Public Relations, which he studied at the St. John’s University in Queens. Brutus now deftly applies his innate ability of storytelling to art. Drawing inspiration from diverse source materials culled from the realms of fashion, film, music, photography, art, and politics, he fluidly interweaves subtle and overt references to the past and present, the real and imagined to create vignettes that seem to collapse discrete eras and context.