BRANDON J. DONAHUE-SHIPP

BRANDON J. DONAHUE-SHIPP’s latest series of painting collages are reconstructed t-shirts transformed into canvases. The collaged scrap images depict mundane moments from his personal life made more vibrant and abstract. Complementing the paintings, his new series, Scrap, is a work on paper that features airbrushed polytab scraps. These works reflect his mural practice and the process of applying a thin fabric to walls in a collage-like manner. In both works, he displays his love for vibrant hues and the tactile quality of airbrush techniques.

Coach’s Playbook, prints on paper, juxtaposes basketball playbook diagrams onto courtroom floor plans. Through the layering of these two simple visuals, Donahue-Shipp reminds us of the complex histories played out in the American legal system. The prints come in various paper colors in reference to the 20th-century American Brown Paper Bag Test.

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 informed handling of the symbolic qualities of his materials. 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 received his BFA from Tennessee State University and his MFA from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Banneker-Douglass Museum, Annapolis, MD; Frist Museum, Nashville, TN; 13th Havana Biennial, Matanzas, Cuba; South Kentucky Performing Arts Center, Bowling Green, KY; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; McKenna Museum, New Orleans, LA; Athica Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, GA; and many others. He is the recipient of the MSAC Public Art Across Maryland Planning Grant; Tanne Foundation Award, alongside numerous other awards and grants. His work resides in numerous permanent collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Metro Arts Nashville, Nashville, TN; Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN; Banneker-Douglass Museum, Annapolis, MD; Arrowmont School of Craft, Gatlinburg, TN; Cordish Collection, Hanover, MD; and more. 

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.