Hebru Brantley

Bronzeville, trains and film school

Hebru Brantley was born in 1981 and grew up in Bronzeville, on the South Side of Chicago. He came to art through the city's graffiti scene of the nineties, tagging trains, walls and whatever else stood still long enough, and he has never treated that apprenticeship as something to grow out of. He went on to take a degree in film at Clark Atlanta University and worked in design and media illustration before painting full time.

Two inheritances shape the work. The first is AfriCOBRA, the Black artists' collective founded on the South Side, whose flat, high key colour and insistence on images made for a Black audience run straight through his canvases. The second is the mural and graffiti tradition itself, which gave him scale, speed and a habit of working in public. To these he adds Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Robert Colescott, Andy Warhol and Kerry James Marshall, along with hip hop, anime and manga.

Flyboy and dark fiction

Brantley's practice is built around a small cast of recurring characters, chief among them Flyboy, a child in aviator goggles, and Lil Mama. Flyboy began as a reference to the Tuskegee Airmen, the Black military aviators of the Second World War, and grew into something larger: a protagonist designed to stand in the same canon as Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny and Batman, but Black. The artist has described the pair as his own Mickey and Minnie.

He calls the resulting territory dark fiction, where dark denotes an identity, a continent and a frame of mind rather than a mood. In the Negro Mythos series he reimagines the superheroes of American popular culture as people of colour, which is less a critique of those heroes than an argument about who gets to be drawn as one. The characters are usually shown looking upward, fists out, in poses lifted from comic books, and the palette is deliberately bright and welcoming; the accessibility is a device, and the questions underneath it about nostalgia, fear, safety, power and hope are not simple ones.

His materials are similarly unfussy. Oil, acrylic, watercolour and spray paint appear alongside coffee and tea used as stains, and the work moves without apparent effort between canvas, wall, cast vinyl and room sized installation.

From Chicago walls to Tokyo galleries

Brantley began showing in Chicago in 2007 and built outward from there, with exhibitions in New York in 2010, San Francisco in 2013 and London in 2014. The Chicago Cultural Center gave him a solo presentation in 2014, and the August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh followed in 2016.

In 2019 he opened Nevermore Park in the Pilsen neighbourhood of Chicago, a six thousand square foot walkthrough installation of Flyboy's fictional home town that drew more than twenty thousand ticketed visitors and pushed the work firmly out of the gallery and into the experience economy. Museum and auction house attention followed: a solo exhibition at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in 2021, a selling exhibition titled Solus staged by Phillips in Hong Kong in the same year, a show at the Wynwood Walls in Miami in 2022 and, in 2023, an exhibition with Nanzuka Underground in Tokyo, the gallery that now represents him. He lives in Los Angeles, where he has been extending the Flyboy universe into film and television through his own media company.

His collectors are a roll call of celebrity, among them LeBron James, Jay Z and Beyonce, Lenny Kravitz and George Lucas, and he has worked with Nike, Adidas, Hublot, Lego, Lacoste and Billionaire Boys Club.

What comes to auction

Three quite different kinds of object carry his name, and confusing them is the main way buyers go wrong. Unique paintings on canvas, usually signed, titled and dated on the reverse, sit at the top and are what the international salerooms offer. Below them come the signed and numbered lithographs and screenprints, which are where most collectors start and which are produced in real quantity.

At the bottom, and by far the most numerous, are the cast vinyl figures and brand collaborations. Many carry only a printed signature and a manufacturer's mark on the underside, and were made in editions of a thousand or more, sometimes with no stated edition size at all. They are legitimate Brantley products and they are worth having, but they are merchandise in the designer toy tradition rather than sculpture, and they should never be priced against a painting. For any of them the original packaging, the edition number where one exists and the condition of the printed surface do most of the work in setting a value.