Exhibition Review: Blue Magic Moment: The Enchanted Roots of Jillian Marie Browning
Published January 20th 2025
Danelle Bernten
In the East gallery of the Albany Museum of Art in Albany, GA, Ocala artist Jillian Marie Browning brews a tincture of transparency and opaqueness in her show entitled Rootwork from August 29, 2024 through January 4, 2025. Curator of African Collections and African Diasporic Art, Sidney Pettice displays Browning’s autobiography and universal Black culture by referencing the iconic Blue Magic hair grease in its color, design, and shine. In the same mix, Pettice hangs up artworks requiring deeper art historical analysis and nods to the post-war drapes of African American abstract artist Sam Gilliam and pop seriality of Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans. Browning’s self-portraits display an alternative reading of the Black body and its hair practices. In From the Ground Up (2023), Browning weaves a space in which photographic images of her father’s 10 x 10 patch of sugar cane on his four acres are mapped with images of her natural locs.
Jillian Marie Browning, From the Ground Up, 2023, Cyanotype on Cotton. Photo by Danelle Bernten Photo courtesy of The Albany Museum of Art and the artist
While Kentucky born Gilliam wanted to evoke a sense of clothes hanging on a line with his drape paintings and my feminist art history inclination seeks to give credit to the difficult and menial labor of the washerwoman in the North and South with the look of draped works, instead, Browning invokes Southern herbal healing spiritual practices.(1) An African diasporic knowledge of botany and wisdom continued by slaves and their descendants in the Americas, particularly in the South, makes us envision what slaves were able to seed and cultivate spiritually and physically when permitted to have their own pieces of land to grow their own fruits and vegetables or in secret. Historically, Southern rootworkers sought and achieved healing in the Black body when standard medicines were not afforded nor permitted to be used on Black bodies, slave or free. The plant, prayers, and spirits (in drink and form), were all that we had for curation. Rootwork practices continue despite advances in pharmaceutical medicine and improved legal and economic access to health care. Browning offers no specifics but acknowledges the important role rootworkers have played in the deep South with medicine and holistic healing. These practices reflect what Martinican poet and essayist, Édouard Glissant, would identify as still deserving of opacity and shielding.(2)
In addition to our thoughts of pesticide free fruits and vegetables and natural sugars within the wild mesh of leaves, Browning shifts our eyes to her Black coils of hair, combed, twisted, and locked into desirable shapes from healthy scalps devoid of carcinogenic hair relaxers. In both images, we see a renewed call for health in the Black body. In what other ways, does she point us in this organic direction? In her custom-made wallpaper work of Blue Magic (2020) in seriality, we recall the mass processed Campbell soup cans of Andy Warhol and corporate consumption of high levels of sodium accompanying high blood pressure levels and deadly heart disease in the Black community, but she offers healing and healthy practices in its stead.
Jillian Marie Browning, Blue Magic, 2024, Cyanotype on Cotton. Photo by Danelle Bernten Photo courtesy of The Albany Museum of Art and the artist
In her plot of Black hair grease, she plants a land of bottles of Blue Magic in a virgin black earth merging past and present. Her works play a bit with time. When we look across at From the Ground Up and peer at Blue Magic, Browning’s drapes slightly remind of the handy cloths or rags used to cool the hot combs during old fashioned hair pressing (straightening). Her grid and bottles resemble straight or curved lines designed on our scalp with the rattail comb. During our hair management, we tried to scratch our scalps but were swatted away with the comb, with love of coarse… The word grease conjures images of hair and/or cooking and in brilliant post-structuralist fashion, Browning encourages us as adults to make our soups and meals from scratch for healthier living. Next, with Pop art bravado, she pulls us into the commercial present where the Memphis founded Black Magic company continues to process old and new products that we utilize on our children and grandchildren’s virgin hair even today. (3)
By placing cyanotype prints on cotton, Browning waves a photographic wand highlighting US Southern history of slave driven profits from cotton plantations for the world and initially overlooked aesthetically, Southern artistic traditions in fabrics that we find in Gee’s Bend quilts. What appear like coils of hair are patterns of abstraction within wooden embroidery hoops utilized normally in sewing and crafts. She has elevated women’s work by incorporating “negative” photographic methods to images of positive refinement. In Matriarchal Line (2018-2021), we seek to touch the soft cotton within the hard edge of the hoop.
Jillian Marie Browning, Matriarchal Line, 2023, Cyanotype on Cotton, Photo by Danelle Bernten Photo courtesy of The Albany Museum of Art and the artist
Its diagonal installation creates moving metaphorical discs and plates of Black Southern femininity forced to cook, sew, and serve hands and homes who many times exhibited cruelty to her ancestors, herself, and her kin. As the discs appear to rotate upwards and downwards, we wonder how the women in her family fared. Are the larger hoops the matriarchs of the family? Are the smaller circles children or up and comers? One thing is clear; all of the women are in tandem with each other, even if they differ in size. They are the same shape and Blue Magic colors offering us a sense of female harmony and succession.
Lastly, The Root (2022) displays Browning’s hair from the front and back in triptych, hanging softly like willow branches from a fantastical blue tree. She invites us to reach for her locs knowing that her roots are strong and firm, not easily swayed by Mother Nature’s storms.
Jillian Marie Browning, The Root, 2022, Cyanotype on Cotton. Photo by Danelle Bernten Photo courtesy of The Albany Museum of Art and the artist
In her use of blue for the figure and hair, she provides various smooth shades of navy, cerulean, azure, and baby and midnight blue that bathe us in pigments of spiritual surrender and artistic freedom. With Blue Magic grease, Browning has successfully loosened the stiff artistic boundaries of photography, sculpture, and craft while simultaneously tracking the Black woman’s role in advancing all three disciplines.
(1) Ben Davis, “How to look at a Sam Gillian Painting: With One Eye on History and the Other on Color and Form,” Artnet, August 28, 2019, htps://news.artnet.com/art-world/sam-gilliam-drape-painting-dia-1634428
(2) Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
(3) Hal Foster, The First Pop Age: Paintings and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
Ms. Danelle Bernten (she/her) is an art historian residing in Tallahassee, Florida. Her focus areas are African American art, Southern art, and folk art and spirituality. Recently, she has been published in AICA, InLiquid, Ruckus Journal, and Princeton University Art Museum Magazine.