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.