Some Assembly Required by Nakeya Brown

Issue 150

My personal identity is rooted in my family’s Jamaican lineage and the complexities of working womanhood. As a working mother, I’ve explored the industries of labor occupied by my maternal grandmother, Vernice, to process my own challenges with parenthood. Photography has helped me to activate her name and legacy, which has a place inside me. Though not here in the physical realm, she’s shown me a woman’s place is wherever she puts her feet and one’s sense of place has no borders.

Nakeya Brown’s photographs trace the histories of expressions of beauty within Black womanhood. Her series, Mass Production Comes Home, delves into her own personal history and heritage, focusing around her grandmother’s history of labor. A patchwork-like grid of images display snapshots of Brown’s grandmother at work in an automotive manufacturing plant, along with carefully composed still lives of objects such as towels, or a blue vanity box set against mid century floral wallpaper. The interplay of images speaks to dueling natures of work: labor within the site of the factory, and items associated with self care, or domestic labor. Quilting these overlapping notions of labor together, Brown creates a kind of visual heirloom, linking her to the ancestors who came before her.

Nakeya Brown (she/her) lives and works in Baltimore, MD.
www.nakeyabrown.com | @nakeya_brown

Images © Nakeya Brown