"Brenna Youngblood at Â鶹´«Ã½ Museum of Art," by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, KCRW's Art Talk
Brenna Youngblood acknowledges the legacy of assemblage — from Robert Rauschenberg to Betye Saar and beyond — but she won't be buried by it. There are hints, scraps, evocations of the world operating outside the studio but her allegiance is to making something new out of something old. Youngblood has an MFA from UCLA where she studied photography with James Welling and Catherine Opie so the rigors of critical theory and questions about representation have come into play. Most recently, she has integrated her own history with contemporary art history, painting large abstract panels with elements of collage: highly sophisticated works that hold onto their intimate roots.