Brittney Boyd Bullock: the space between us

MARCH 26 – APRIL 29, 2022

Brittney Boyd Bullock is a Memphis visual artist, arts program director, and entrepreneur. She’s worked as Project Manager for the Urban Art Commission, managing Memphis’s largest public art archive, and as the Partnerships and Community Engagement Manager for Crosstown Concourse & Crosstown Arts, overseeing various collaborative creative programs and exhibitions. She’s now the Director of Youth Programs for the Memphis Music Initiative, helping to build sustainable relationships with Memphis’ youth while implementing youth-led and youth-driven programs. Her journey of cultivating trust and lasting relationships has created opportunities for collaboration with various communities, organizations, and artists that invite participation from a broad range of backgrounds.

As a former fellow and past mentor of the Robert E. Gard award ArtUp Fellowship, her interests in community engagement and social change have led her to an art practice that invites artists to redefine why they create, how they create, and for what purposes. Local (ArtsMemphis, Assisi Foundation) and national (Kresge Foundation) philanthropic organizations have funded and supported her work as an artist collaborating with communities. She has served on various boards, advisory committees, and panels, including lecturing at college institutions and museums. 

When she’s not creating art or creative programs for youth, she spends time with her husband and son, traveling, and planning game nights with family and friends.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
As an artist working in fiber, mixed-media, and abstraction, my work explores the tension between searching and finding, obsession and order, and lightness and darkness through two and three-dimensional forms. Contemplative and personal, my process-driven works interrogate anxiety and wonder using materials in a new way, forcing me to make meaning in the arbitrary jumble. 

My work is a sensory dwelling that tells the story of my lineage by using repetition, color, and story in ways that trigger joy and wonder. I use ephemera and memorabilia to reimagine possibilities, create new solutions, and ask more questions. Making new contexts for old worlds makes them new again; these new versions of what already exists is how I understand the power of play, existence, world-building, and the human experience.