ArT @ 967 Payne Presents BLACKNIFICENT VOL. 3, Opening on Juneteenth

Banner Image: Little Haiti. Ron Brown, Acrylic on Wood Board, 40 x 24 inches. Image courtesy of ArT @ 967 Payne.

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For more than twenty years, Minneapolis artist Ron Brown has built a multidisciplinary practice rooted in Afrocentric thought, cultural memory, and community engagement. Working across painting, live performance, music production, furniture making, and wearable art, Brown has developed a body of work that reflects both personal experience and broader histories of the African diaspora.

This Friday, Brown presents BLACKNIFICENT VOL. 3, a solo exhibition and retrospective at ArT @ 967 Payne in St. Paul. Bringing together work from across two decades of artistic production, the exhibition offers an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of Brown's practice while highlighting themes that have remained central throughout his career.

The exhibition opens on Juneteenth, a date Brown intentionally selected while planning the show with Stephan Kistler, co-founder, curator, and ad hoc manager of ArT @ 967 Payne. The holiday commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans and serves as a fitting context for an exhibition centered on Black identity, cultural inheritance, and self-determination.

That commitment is visible throughout the exhibition. Brown's work draws from African and African diasporic histories, hip-hop culture, jazz traditions, spirituality, and contemporary Black life. Together, the works create what Brown describes as a visual language informed by both ancestry and imagination.

 

Blue Throne. Ron Brown, Acrylic on Wooden Stool, 21 X 10 X 13 inches.

 

One example is Blue Throne, a repurposed wooden chair that once occupied a place in Brown's own home. Transformed into a sculptural artwork, the piece references traditional African throne forms while incorporating the Sankofa symbol at its center. Originating among the Akan people of Ghana, Sankofa is commonly translated as "go back and get it," emphasizing the importance of learning from the past in order to move forward.

"It has the Sankofa symbol in the middle of it," Brown explained. The symbol's emphasis on remembrance and continuity reflects concerns that appear throughout much of his work

Brown frequently incorporates symbols, hidden references, and layered meanings into his paintings. In Mathematics, a black canvas covered with hand-painted equations and numerical sequences, viewers eventually discover the outline of an Adidas Forum sneaker embedded within the composition. The work emerged from Brown's interest in questions of freedom and possibility. "My whole idea was which of these equations is going to equal freedom?" Brown said. "It's a formula a mathematician is trying to figure out." The painting transforms mathematics into a metaphor for liberation, presenting freedom as both a personal and collective problem that remains unresolved.

 

Mathematics. Ron Brown, Acrylic on Stretched Canvas, 36 x 36 inches.

 

The exhibition arrives at a particularly significant moment in Brown's career. After two decades of creative work across multiple disciplines, he continues to expand his practice rather than settle into a single approach. "I'm always changing," Brown said. "As an artist of color, specifically in the Twin Cities, I can't afford to be one-dimensional." For Brown, BLACKNIFICENT VOL. 3 serves as both a retrospective and a point of orientation. Looking back at twenty years of work has provided an opportunity to identify recurring ideas while considering future directions.

"This is an accumulation of me trying to figure out the direction with my work," he said. One constant throughout that journey has been Brown's commitment to Afrocentric perspectives and imagery. His work frequently imagines connections between African histories, contemporary Black culture, and speculative futures. "I've been Black Panther Wakanda forever since the seventh grade," Brown said. "In my mind, everything has been with Wakanda. It's like I'm in America when I really want to go home. And so this is my passport home."

While Brown's work is deeply informed by global Black histories, it is equally shaped by Minnesota. Several works in the exhibition engage with events that have transformed public conversations about race, justice, and community in the Twin Cities over the past decade. Brown points to a series of blue paintings included in the exhibition, referencing both police uniforms and broader questions of power and accountability. "I think that the way we've had such a catalyst of events happening in the Twin Cities over the last decade or so, we're kind of ground zero for white America when it comes to violence in the community," he said.

At the same time, Brown sees the Twin Cities as a place of immense creative potential. "I think that sometimes in the Twin Cities, we get a lot of events like this, but they don't necessarily live up to the magnitude of our pride in our ingenuity or our creative juices in the world," he said.

The exhibition reflects both perspectives. It acknowledges difficult histories while emphasizing resilience, creativity, and collective possibility.

Knowledge – Wisdom – Understanding, one of the featured works in the exhibition, exemplifies Brown's ongoing interest in education, self-discovery, and cultural knowledge. Like many of the works included in BLACKNIFICENT VOL. 3, it invites viewers to consider how history, identity, and community intersect.

 

Knowledge - Wisdom - Understanding. Ron Brown, Acrylic on Wood Board, 48 x 24 inches.

 

Even when engaging with difficult subjects, Brown ultimately approaches his work from a position of hope.

"I want to kind of encompass the idea of Juneteenth, of course," he said. "But then I also want you to understand that this is kind of like a soulful visual mixtape of my art. This is a transcendence of who I am as a person and also as an artist."

That description captures the spirit of BLACKNIFICENT VOL. 3. Part retrospective, part celebration, and part roadmap for future work, the exhibition traces twenty years of artistic experimentation while remaining grounded in community and cultural memory. Brown's practice continues to evolve, but its central concerns—Afrocentric vision, creative exploration, and collective connection—remain firmly intact.

The exhibition opening and artist reception for BLACKNIFICENT VOL. 3 will take place June 19 from 5–9 p.m. (informal program at 6:15 p.m.) at ArT @ 967 Payne, 967 Payne Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55130.◼︎ 

ArT @ 967 Payne is a collaborative studio, co-working, and gallery space on the East Side of St. Paul, home to a collective of some twenty resident artists who maintain working studios, with a storefront gallery that turns over exhibitions every four to six weeks. We are also a founding force behind the annual Solidarity Street Gallery festival along Payne Avenue each fall. In a commercial corridor where many of the businesses are BIPOC-owned, we have worked to create something rare in the Twin Cities: an authentic, community-rooted, culturally diverse arts hub at the storefront level.