Artist Spotlight: Brittany Tucker

Header Image: "Two Taxpayers", 2019. Oil on panel.

For artist Brittany Tucker, doodles were almost forbidden in her childhood home. Her mother was an artist that focused on realistic portraits and never really accepted cartoonish doodles as “art”. But looking at Tucker’s body of works, it’s clear that it is precisely these cartoons that make her works stand out from the rest.

Tucker’s paintings both reverse the racist narrative and emphasize them. By rendering the white figure as a cartoonish doodle and Tucker herself in life-like details, the emphasis is applied to Tucker, the Black girl with natural hair, not the white man in a button-up. 

But standing out isn’t always a good thing. In many of her paintings, Tucker is the only one rendered in this manner. It’s a feeling that many minorities feel, especially Black people. They are different, othered, and are made to feel as if they don’t and never could belong.

View more of Tucker’s works on her website and Instagram.