Akea Brionne Ornamented Portrait

The work is inspired by Brionne's large-scale self portraits on display at her first solo show at CPM Gallery in Baltimore. CPM describes Brionne's process best: "to create these portraits, Brionne takes photographs of herself and distorts them by supplying text prompts to an AI algorithm of her design, searching for the “right words” to describe herself as a person, an Afro-Creole woman, and an artist in the world. The AI’s mutations warp the figures and environments so greatly that each painting looks like a different person. Brionne has the resulting images digitally woven on jacquard tapestry, then she stretches them around canvas and adorns them with mixed media, yarn, and multi-colored crystals that shimmer as the viewer moves around the work." When we completed our last project, the Sena Cleave woven portraits, we ended up with two final artworks and we used our second image for this project so we were starting with a woven painting/photo which was a nice tie-in to Brionne's part photo, part AI generated images. Like Brionne, we used various decorative materials like yarn, thread, sequins, beads and jewels to decorate our self portraits. Students were encouraged to be thoughtful about how they decorated their artwork and to be intentional about whether they were enhancing, adorning, or obscuring parts of their portraits with their decorations. This project was so much fun and students did an incredible job creating thoughtful, beautiful and playful self portraits.