MoCP - Darkroom 2023

In this series titled AS ONE, Brendan Fernandes works with objects from the University of Buffalo Art Galleries’ Cravens Collection with partial views of dancers from the American Ballet Theatre to highlight the disembodied nature of the objects in collections. As a Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent, Fernandes photographs African masks to challenge the ownership and provenance of museum collections with ethnographic and archaeological histories. He states: “Historically, museums have been spaces of hegemony. My practice has often been about finding space for critique within that history. As an artist I believe that my role in museums can be to challenge our understanding of how museums and their powers operate.”

Brendan Fernandes has been included in exhibitions at the Chrysler Art Museum, VA (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019); the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2019); The Guggenheim Museum, NY; the 2019 Whitney Biennial, NY; and the DePaul University Art Museum, IL (2018) among others. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, IL; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, QC; and the Wedge Collection, Toronto, ON, among others. Fernandes is also the recipient of the Artadia Award (2019), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2019), Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020), and Black Cube Artist Fellow (2022). He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.

Website: brendanfernandes.ca/