Cynthia Brannvall is a California native of African American and Swedish descent. Cynthia is a multi-media artist and art historian. 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. 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 selected for juried group exhibitions in Berkeley, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Rafael, Palo Alto, San Luis Obispo, and Los Angeles. She has had 15 artworks placed in the bay area shows through the SF Moma Artist Gallery. Cynthia Brannvall is a full-time tenured track professor of Art History at Foothill College. An active advocate for social justice and equity, Cynthia is engaged in the campus communities Umoja and Sankofa, which aim to uplift, and support students of color and amplify their voices and excellence in scholarship.
Textiles are potent signifiers of labor, trade, industry, slavery, luxury, baptisms, weddings, funerals, gender, and history. Brannvall engages with textiles to exist between craft and fine art, the past and the present, painting, and sculpture, landscape, and portrait. Another layer of meaning in the work
considers contradictions of whiteness in textiles alluding to the constructs of something pure, stained, fragmented, constructed, degraded, broken, and enduring.
Continents engage with identity as a terrain imagined from memory, nostalgia, and culture in flux from forced and voluntary migrations. The three panels represent the continents that comprise the deep time origins and migrations of the artists’ ancestry. The composed abstract patterns are imagined protein folds of DNA that travel across bodies of water and continents through inherited traits into the bodies of ancestors. This work explores the capacity of textiles to create a visual language for identity that acknowledges, respects and celebrates the entanglement of multiple identities, and the ways in which they are tethered to history, culture, economies, and geographies.
The Threads that Bind A Divided Nation is the US flag rendered in cotton by a black woman and includes the Mason Dixon Line gap that is the root of disparity engendering white supremacy from the bodies of its black and indigenous and first nation inhabitants. Threads stitched throughout express the interconnected and tangled culpability of the country as a whole with all of its ideologies and systems of oppression.
The encaustic sculpture installation Present Council are vulnerable ghostly presences evoking the hard-fought historical battles for women’s rights and speak to the fragility of those rights in present circumstances. The 19th-century blouses hold the memory of their wearers and the encaustic preserves and evokes their presence. Ghostly and fragile but holding hallowed ground.
Jurisdiction, is composed of 9 sleeve fragments represent the supreme court justices— 3 of the sleeve fragments have feminine details indicating the female justices. They oppose a set of lacy feminine sleeves indicating the gender balance in legislating women.
