Artist Extends The Family

Though the style of the paintings is utterly contemporary, the mood somehow evokes both family photos in the living room and a formal ancestral shrine, cozy and familiar yet also reverential. The paintings are of the artist’s family, their humanity captured and elevated by the painter’s keen eye and steady hand. The photographs help in showing what the artist is up to, how he sees the people he loves through the way that he works. They’re also a first step in understanding, in the context of his artistic practice, what the artist means by ​“family.”

The paintings are part of ​“Made Visible: Unveiled Roots,” a show of works by New Haven native Marquis Brantley Sr., running now at Creative Arts Workshop through March 1. 

As an accompanying note explains, Brantley is a self-taught artist who ​“uses his practice to reveal the innate brilliance within every individual. His studio is a sanctuary where art becomes a powerful journey of self-exploration and joyous recognition. His work celebrates the capacity of Black men and boys to rise above adversity, find their voices, and act on their passions — transforming narratives of struggle into visions of hope.”

The lower level of CAW’s gallery contains ​“six portraits of the Black men and boys who have had the greatest impact on Brantley’s life” — his children, his brother, and his father. ​“The exhibition serves as an homage to Brantley’s family, with photographs depicting generations of relatives displayed throughout the gallery, illustrating the many shoulders on which he stands as he forges his path as a thriving painter.”

“This exhibition amplifies voices and stories that are too often overlooked, yet they are central to understanding our shared humanity,” Brantley is quoted as saying. ​“Each portrait is a tribute to the men who have left a lasting impact on my life, and through their stories, I hope others find inspiration and strength.”

In the family portraits, Brantley’s affection for his subjects is clear. The portraits are quite large — in a regular living room, they would dominate the wall they were on — but Brantley doesn’t make his relatives monumental. Instead, he uses the scale of the paintings to be able to convey lots of details about his relatives’ personalities, giving us a lot about the way they move through the world, the way they carry themselves. The faces are never neutral; in a few instances they convey so much meaning that it’s possible to speculate on what they’re saying, and how they say it. Brantley gives us his subjects’ lived-in humanity while also making them as large as life.

On the second floor, more works use the same incisive eye and deft ability with the brush, but there the subjects of the paintings aren’t direct family members, but well-known figures from the recent past. Mike Tyson makes an appearance, as does Michael Jordan. So does painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, taken from a famous photograph of him. The style of the paintings on the upper floor differs from the lower floor. Where in the family portraits the covers are vivid but truer to life, on the upper floor more liberties are taken, creating splashes of color that don’t exist in the world.

The choice of subjects also spans generations. The subtitle of the show — ​“unveiled roots” — implies ancestry, but in the family section of the exhibition, Brantley makes clear that he’s influenced by those around him regardless of age. Why shouldn’t roots bend forward in time anyway? Why can’t our siblings and our children nourish us, ground us, and sustain us as well as our grandparents and our forbears can?

The show extends this idea to fellow artists, and in doing so, widens the definition of what family is for artistic purposes. So, for example, in addition to Basquiat, a clear forbear, there’s a portrait of Donald Glover, taken recognizably from his Childish Gambino video for ​“This Is America.” In music, film, and television, Glover continues to push at the edges of what art, and Black art, can be. There’s no reason Brantley can’t make him an artistic cousin, and so he does. The inspiration an artist draws from other artists’ work is its own kind of lineage, as important as blood in the creation of art.

“Made Visible: Unveiled Roots,” is running now at Creative Arts Workshop through March 1. Visit CAW’s website for hours and more information.