Cynthia Brannvall
Cynthia Brannvall is an art historian and a multi-media artist who teaches art history as a full-time faculty member of Foothill Community College. She is a California native of African American and Swedish descent. Cynthia has undergraduate degrees in Art Practice and Art History from UC Berkeley where she was a Phi Beta Kappa and a Ronald E. McNair Scholar and was awarded the Departmental Citation for her research in Art History. She has an MA in Art History from San Francisco State University with an emphasis on Modern and Contemporary art. An advocate and ally for social justice and equity, Cynthia’s artwork explores identity formation envisioned in an imagined deep time terrain of memory, reclamation, and the geographies of forced and voluntary migrations. Her artwork has been selected for juried group exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Washington DC. She has an affiliation with SF Moma Artists Gallery and Chandra Cerrito Gallery.
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Identity Mapping Series are intergenerational portraits of Cynthia Brannvall’s family members collaged with historical, contemporary, and satellite maps from the countries and continents of her heritage. The range of maps includes “outdated” versions with countries that no longer exist or illustrate first nation territories in what would become the United States of America. It is a visual exploration of the artists' interest in the instability of place in regard to notions of nativism and identity. The first nation peoples offer an understanding of identity as connected to seven generations before and seven generations forward. Brannvall considers this in terms of the geography and nationalism of her ancestry and concludes that it is more accurate to understand identity formation and the concept of belonging as an unstable journey. For the artist, intergenerational identity and belonging are a path that meanders through time and places with changing borders, political systems, names, and dates that are determined by exploration, conquest, colonialism, opportunity, lust, and love.
