BLACK, IN BLUE | Gabrielle Brooke Solo Exhibition
About this Event
BLACK, IN BLUE is Gabrielle Brooke's debut solo exhibition—a collection of recent works exploring memory, Blackness, girlhood, identity, and the emotional language of blue. Through watercolor and acrylic paintings, Gabrielle transforms emotions that words cannot fully express into portraits that invite viewers into a dreamlike space where joy, grief, and hope exist together.
Join us for the Opening Reception on September 24—Gabrielle's Golden Birthday—for an evening of art, music, wine, and community as we celebrate the opening of her first solo exhibition. We can't wait to celebrate with you.
Artist Statement by Gabrielle Brooke
Blue is an emotional and visual language. I began leaning into this theme in 2025, though its presence had been quietly finding its way into my work long before then. As I continued to create, I realized blue was more than a stylistic choice, it became a way to connect memories and move through time, carrying grief, dread, despair, and pain alongside hope and aspiration. Like water, my paintings stay in flow between past and present; like the sky, they create space to dream, reflect, and ask "What's next?" I use vibrant colors and expressive features to give my subjects an emotional presence that feels both intimate and otherworldly. I want the viewer to enter a dreamlike state where memory and reality overlap, where joy and sorrow can exist in the same frame.
Black in Blue reflects the ways Black identity is expansive, emotionally layered, and continually becoming. These works draw from memories of girlhood, moments of joy and belonging, and the experiences through which I learned what it meant to be Black and proud. Blue has become a vessel for both personal and collective memory—sustaining the tension between abundance and lack, tenderness and pain, grief and enthusiasm. There is something deeply intertwined between Blackness and blue: the blues as music, the water that carries the melancholic memory of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The same vast bodies of water which separated African people from the only home they knew is the same water that surrounds and sustains us. Its fluidity, each wave, represents life force itself. Just as the blue of the sky reminds us to look upward and imagine a future of prosperity and freedom. Across this body of work, I reflect on the ways these emotions have flowed through my life and the ways I have used art to stay afloat.
This exhibition is also in conversation with the cultural works that have shaped my and the culture’s understanding of Blackness, memory, and the blues: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues, Imani Perry's Black in Blues, and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. Across literature, music, and visual culture, the blues repeatedly emerges as more than sadness but a language for longing, beauty, and transformation. Black in Blue is my addition to this ongoing cultural conversation through painting, exploring what happens when the emotional language of the blues moves onto canvas.
Where is it happening?
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