Photography Alumna Akea Brionne Opens First Solo Museum Exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum

Akea Brionne in studio. Photos by Kyle Powell. Courtesy of the Artist and Library Street Collective.

Cranbrook Academy of Art is proud to rejoice alumna Akea Brionne (MFA Photography 2023), whose first solo museum exhibition, Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour, can be on view to the general public at Cranbrook Art Museum from June 20, 2026, via September 6, 2026. The exhibition is the fourth installment of Cranbrook Art Museum’s Fresh Paint collection, which highlights current work from Detroit-area up to date artists.

An opening celebration for the museum’s total summer season season takes place on Friday, June 19, from 6 to 9pm.  An artist speak and moderated dialogue will happen on July 18, 2026, at 3 pm. Visit the museum’s website for tickets, hours, and extra info.

Brionne is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist working inside Afro-Surrealism whose observe explores the connection between colonial and imperialist histories and their reverberations into cultural storytelling, id politics, and assimilation. Working on the intersection of lens and fiber-based media, and harnessing rising applied sciences together with synthetic intelligence and digital weaving, she interprets surreal compositions into large-scale, multipaneled jacquard tapestries adorned with glitter, rhinestones, and oil pastels. Her work facilities on the African Diaspora, with a specific curiosity in Afro-Creole tradition, formed partly by her origins in New Orleans and her upbringing in Baltimore.

Situated within the North Gallery, A Dreaming Hour presents a brand new physique of labor depicting Afrosurreal worlds constructed from private and archival reference factors, centering a legendary forest as a web site of refuge and communion. Foregrounding Brionne’s background in pictures, the compositions reframe the panorama, portrait, and panorama towards new ends, posing themes of consciousness, notion, and non secular and embodied data.

Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Katy Kim, the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Curatorial Fellow, with assist from Chief Curator Laura Mott. It is generously supported by the Gilbert Family Foundation and the Deroy Testamentary Foundation.

Brionne is represented by Library Street Collective, Detroit, and is at present an AICAD Fellow and Assistant Professor on the Kansas City Art Institute. She can be a 2025 Knight Foundation Arts + Tech Fellow.

Learn extra:

Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour – Cranbrook Art Museum

Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art