Marcus Brutus (b. 1991, Silver Spring, MD) is a self-taught, New York City-based artist whose paintings explore ideas of power through portraiture by examining Black American identity and civil rights struggles. Brutus, who holds a Bachelor of Science degree from St. John’s University, Queens and previously worked in Public Relations, deftly applies his innate ability of storytelling to art. Culling from a diversity of source material—fashion, film, music, archival photography, and literature, for instance—he fluidly entwines subtle and overt references to the past and present, working between imagined and documented states to create vignettes that collapse discrete eras and context. There is a palpable intensity to his work, reinforced by a radiant palette held in tension with gesso-bare canvas, and dynamically askew lines that wind and fray upon the image plane. “What I’m trying to do is establish a legacy,” Brutus explains. “I want to show these very contemporary issues but show them as having some long past.” ...
