ROZEAL

ROZEAL (American, b. 1966)
Formerly, Iona Rozeal Brown earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Yale University. She also has a background in music and was professionally wired as a DJ in Japan before setting up her current studio in Maryland.
She has received numerous accolades for her signature a3 works, a name signifying Afro-Asiatic allegories. Also known as the blackface paintings, this series explores the appropriation of American hip-hop culture by Japanese teenagers (mostly girls) in the late 1990s as part of the ganguro fashion trend that involved darkly tanning skin.
ROZEAL’s color and cross-cultural subject matter merges folklore traditions, contemporary pop culture autobiography, gender studies, and art history into a singular fantastical narrative. Her figurative paintings bear references ranging from JRR Tolkien to Erykah Badu to Adinkra symbolism to the artist’s childhood in Washington, D.C., during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The artist combines disparate elements into an elaborate allegory that feels both otherworldly and universal.

ROZEAL | The Biggs Museum of American Art
OCTOBER 3, 2024 – MARCH 2, 2025
Want Not (Rescue from the Otherwise Obscene, Salvation from the Wicked)

Keyes Art is honored to have worked for the past two years with the Biggs Museum and ROZEAL to put together a very special group of works from this American treasure. 
The Biggs Museum of American Art is proud to close out the year with a blockbuster exhibition by renowned artist ROZEAL
This exhibition focuses on a particular set of characters that the artist has been developing within this mythology since 200. Primarily focusing on the intimate moments in the friendships and romantic relationships among female figures, the series explores the pressures and obstacles facing young women today as they seek their authentic selves and build bonds of support within their communities.
The visual conventions of Japanese ukiyo-e and shunga, the Japanese tradition of erotic art, play a strong role in Rozeal's body of work, “Coupledom,” which is laden with intimacy.  Her earlier blackface series mines the rich cross-cultural territory of ganguro and burapan, a subculture of Japanese adolescents that sports tanned skin, bright makeup, blonde wigs, and gold chains to model themselves after the stereotypical African-American hip-hop look. According to many sources, the word ganguro translates to “blackface.”

The paintings of the last decade feature embracing couples, each assigned to their cozy atmosphere (sometimes referred to as a pod). Luxury accessories like strands of pearls and oversized gold jewelry are collaged throughout the compositions, as are walls of speakers. From a series loosely called “All I Ever Wanted . . . (My God . . . my man!),” inspired by the Lenny Kravitz/SeanTaro Ono Lennon tune “All I Ever Wanted,” most of the works are titled with an accompanying haiku as well scripture from The Song of Songs.

The artist’s revisiting of [Japanese artist Kitagawa] Utamaro’s imagery and shunga, the erotic prints of late–Edo Japan, sparked the series’ focus on representations of sensuality and sexuality. Even today, the artist posits, these themes are often presented as merely a barrage of images, leaving nothing to the imagination.

Rozeal brings together Asian and African-American aesthetic traditions in diverse multimedia paintings and collages, fusing imagery of Japanese woodcutting, geishas, and kabuki with modern hip-hop and vogue-ing figures. 

Rozeal earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Yale University in 2002 and has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C. Rozeal's work has been exhibited around the world. She has been featured in many solo exhibitions at numerous galleries and institutions, including:
- A3 Black on Both Sides (2004) at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts
- Rozeal: Matrix 152 (2004) exhibited at Wadsworth Atheneum
- The Paintings of Rozeal (2007) at the University of Arizona
Museum of Art
- All Falls Down (2010) at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
- Introducing… The House of Bando (2012) in New York, NY at Salon 94
- iROZEAL (2014) at the Joslyn Art Museum

In addition to the numerous solo exhibitions Rozeal's artwork has been featured in, her work is permanently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
National Gallery of Art and North Carolina Museum of Art and now,
The Biggs Museum of American Art, Dover, Delaware.