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 celebrate alumna Akea Brionne (MFA Photography 2023), whose first solo museum exhibition, Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour, will be on view to the public at Cranbrook Art Museum from June 20, 2026, through September 6, 2026. The exhibition is the fourth installment of Cranbrook Art Museum’s Fresh Paint series, which highlights recent work from Detroit-area contemporary artists.

An opening celebration for the museum’s entire summer season takes place on Friday, June 19, from 6 to 9pm.  An artist talk and moderated discussion will take place on July 18, 2026, at 3 pm. Visit the museum’s website for tickets, hours, and more information.

Brionne is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist working within Afro-Surrealism whose practice explores the relationship between colonial and imperialist histories and their reverberations into cultural storytelling, identity politics, and assimilation. Working at the intersection of lens and fiber-based media, and harnessing emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and digital weaving, she translates surreal compositions into large-scale, multipaneled jacquard tapestries adorned with glitter, rhinestones, and oil pastels. Her work centers on the African Diaspora, with a particular interest in Afro-Creole culture, shaped in part by her origins in New Orleans and her upbringing in Baltimore.

Situated in the North Gallery, A Dreaming Hour presents a new body of work depicting Afrosurreal worlds built from personal and archival reference points, centering a mythical forest as a site of refuge and communion. Foregrounding Brionne’s background in photography, the compositions reframe the panorama, portrait, and landscape toward new ends, posing themes of awareness, perception, and spiritual and embodied knowledge.

Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Katy Kim, the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Curatorial Fellow, with support 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 currently an AICAD Fellow and Assistant Professor at the Kansas City Art Institute. She is also a 2025 Knight Foundation Arts + Tech Fellow.

Learn more:

Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour – Cranbrook Art Museum

Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art