BRANDON J. DONAHUE-SHIPP
Brandon’s long-term experimentation with aesthetics and techniques deriving from the pop art, street art, and Art Povera movements has resulted in a mastery of the formal and symbolic marriages at play in his work.
Donahue-Shipp’s iconic Basketball Blooms resemble floral blooms emerging from the surface of the wall, lending an organic, natural quality to the prosaic, manufactured basketballs. The alchemy Donahue-Shipp performs in the creation of these pieces is characterized by an informed handling of the symbolic qualities of his materials.
Accompanying the Basketball Blooms is his latest series of screenprints entitled Coach’s Playbook. The screenprints feature the floor-plan of a courtroom with basketball team plays drawn on top in red and blue. The works brim with playfully rendered but foreboding connotations regarding the American legal system.
Donahue-Shipp’s childhood dream of becoming a professional basketball player metamorphosed into a desire to take part in a discussion of basketball within a societal, cultural framework. The works centered both the artist’s own experience with basketball as a cultural lodestone, as well as the interconnecting paths that we all walk as members of larger communities with a shared responsibility to each other, and to the earth from which material is wrought. These social and environmental aspects of the work unfold like the basketballs split open, layered in a complicated, multifaceted unity.
Brandon J. Donahue-Shipp (b. 1985, Memphis, TN) received his BS from Tennessee State University and MFA from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at such venues as Untitled Art Miami Beach ‘21; Banneker-Douglass Museum, Annapolis, MD; Frist Museum, Nashville, TN; South Kentucky Performing Arts Center, Bowling Green, KY; 13th Havana Biennial, Matanzas, Cuba; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; McKenna Museum, New Orleans, LA; Athica Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, GA; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; and many others. He is the recipient of the Tanne Foundation Award, alongside numerous other awards and grants.
His work resides in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Metro Arts Nashville, Nashville, TN; Private Museum Collection, Matanzas, Cuba; Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN; Banneker-Douglass Museum, Annapolis, MD; Rollingscrest Chillum Community Center, Chillum, MD; Madison Park, Community Center, Madison, TN; and Arrowmont School of Craft, Gatlinburg, TN.
Donahue-Shipp has been included in the book publication, “Common Practice: Basketball and Contemporary Art” by Carlos Rolon. This publication from Skira Editore covers more than a century of artwork from over two hundred leading artists—including Nina Chanel Abney, Emma Amos, Romare Bearden, Salvador Dalí, Elaine de Kooning, David Hammons, Barkley Hendricks, Titus Kaphar, Jacob Lawrence, Roy Lichtenstein, Sharon Lockhart, Robert Longo, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, Andy Warhol, Ai Weiwei, and Wendy White.
Past Exhibitions
