TO TELL THE story of Marsha Jackson, the subject of one of Ari Brielle’s recent paintings, it would be remiss not to include Shingle Mountain. Jackson fought for years to have a towering mass of toxic shingles removed from the land next to her house after the 70,000-ton pile was dumped and left there by a recycling company. But in Poisoned by Zip Code, her recent exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art, Brielle wanted people to know there is more to Jackson’s story.
“I would like to invite people to not just think of our strength and power for overcoming oppression when they think of Black people, because when we think that narrowly, we lose sense of the fact that we’re all people with our own stories and our own experiences.”
“The shingles are important, of course, but I wanted to center Marsha first and foremost,” she says. “The shingles are a symbol of the environmental racism she and her community experienced, but Marsha is more than that. I wanted to talk about her horses and her interest in the rodeo, her love of the community and her children.”
This focus on storytelling, of looking beyond what you can easily see on the surface, is what drives Brielle to create art in the first place.
“A lot of my work is about Black women and our experiences, so my art is a way for me to talk about that and the myriad and complex ways our different experiences intersect,” she says. “I would like to invite people to not just think of our strength and power for overcoming oppression when they think of Black people, because when we think that narrowly, we lose sense of the fact that we’re all people with our own stories and our own experiences.”
Most recently, Brielle participated in the 2021 Texas Biennial, and her site-specific installation Ari Brielle: 27 opened at Presa House in San Antonio, Texas.
Brielle joined UTA as a Master of Fine Arts student after being introduced to the program by Associate Professor Sedrick Huckaby. At UTA, she says she’s found the guidance to help hone her perspective as an artist.
“One of the biggest things that has been really beneficial is just being challenged and being introduced to different ways of thinking or working with different materials,” she says. “My professors have been great at offering resources or questioning why I’m doing something in a way that makes me think more deeply about my work.”
